Imagine finding a specialty wrench in a garage that is clean and ordered, one where everything has a specific place and those places were chosen based on practicality and ease of use. Now imagine trying to find the same wrench in a garage where everything has simply been stacked up in whatever order it happened to land as the door is quickly shut behind it so nothing falls out. We know which one is the best choice, but that doesn’t mean we always practice what’s best.

The same can be said about corporate data. It’s growing at such an overwhelming rate, often all anyone can do is the equivalent of getting it in the garage and shutting the door. If someone needed it later, we know it’s there, we know it’s safe, it just might take a little while to find it. But if litigation arises, there are limits – with both time and money – and being able to locate relevant Electronically Stored Information (ESI) quickly and efficiently is vital.

Nancy Patton, Esq., Senior Solutions Consultant with Exterro, brings up one possible strategy to combat this dilemma: “Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, which was the traditional e-discovery strategy, we now tend to look at data with a holistic approach, and by using the latest Information Governance technology, you not only store data in a repository, but you store it in a meaningful way which anticipates future legal needs.”

The dispersion of data across various repositories including endpoints, SaaS applications (Box, Office 365, Google and Salesforce) as well as servers, has made the discovery of data very difficult. The collection and preservation of ESI in a distributed environment is often a cumbersome manual process that can be very time consuming, costly, and can greatly increase the risk of data spoliation, as information is copied, deleted, stored or transferred across unprotected networks.

To add to the complexity, many e-discovery teams are also still using outdated and inadequate legacy products. For organizations that do have old tools in place, they are often not suited for situations where the collection window is short, and they often require heavy involvement from IT or end-users to manually collect data.

But as Druva’s white paper, “Accelerating Your Ediscovery Process While Reducing Costs and Risks,” shows, organizations leveraging cloud applications could easily cut their e-discovery time in half while saving significant costs and minimizing data spoliation risks.

Legal teams now have the ability to quickly and selectively collect and analyze the most relevant data at the very beginning of the case assessments and use that data offensively to gain a significant advantage over opposing counsel. Before legal teams are even served with discovery demands, they can use proactively collected information to help win either a dispositive motion on or a more favorable settlement.

How can Druva and Exterro Help Cut eDiscovery Costs in Half

Druva and Exterro have expanded their respective data protection and e-discovery platforms, enabling organizations to significantly reduce the time, cost and risk associated with traditional approaches to e-discovery through:

Automatic legal hold, in place preservation, collection, and processing from Exterro

– Exterro’s e-discovery suite leverages Druva inSync’s legal hold APIs to seamlessly collect, preserve, and ingest dispersed enterprise data from endpoints and cloud applications into its platform.

Data collection and preservation

– Druva inSync proactively collects and manages all the data across an organization’s laptops, desktops, mobile devices, as well as its cloud applications (without custodian action required). With this data already collected, data is ready for transfer to the Exterro platform within seconds, augmenting data collected from other enterprise sources through the Exterro platform.

Data transfer and ingestion

– Druva inSync and Exterro are both cloud-native technologies, leveraging the proven infrastructure of Amazon Web Services. Data is transferred quickly and securely within the Amazon cloud, eliminating the risk associated with unsecure networks or physical media. In addition, critical administrator and end-user data access reporting maintains a clear record for chain of custody.

Data review

– With rapid ingestion from Druva inSync, without the legacy challenges of limited compute and fixed infrastructure, Exterro makes data easily available for early analysis and review.

Clean up your data garage and save time and money while reducing risks in your e-discovery process!

Click here for Druva’s full white paper!

And check out Exterro’s related resource: Wave of the Future – Streamlining the E-Discovery Process