Make 2012 the year you get your corporate data in shape! Intelligently reduce “Big Data” for more effective and efficient eDiscovery and information governance.

StoredIQ’s new service offering for defensibly reducing enterprise data is designed to ease the burden of identifying, analyzing and collecting matter-relevant information. The StoredIQ Defensible Data Deletion solution utilizes the StoredIQ Platform to help organizations gain insight into business-critical information distributed across the enterprise. By applying intelligence to the governance of Big Data, organizations can reduce the overall corporate data volume by up to 80%, significantly improving the efficiency and success of their eDiscovery initiatives while reducing legal cost and risk.

Explosive growth from unstructured data continues to impede the legal discovery process. According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey, 69% of corporate counsel indicated that working more closely with IT and records management to expire and delete data to limit unnecessary data retention for future litigation requests was the most important priority facing their internal eDiscovery process. Legal and compliance issues typically trigger urgent IT and legal triage, but putting out these fires reactively doesn’t solve the larger problem of poor data governance– often the source of significant costs for large eDiscovery data productions. Minimizing long-term cost and risk requires proactive solutions to reduce irrelevant or “junk” data, and better understand where responsive, regulated or litigious data may be located.

“Defensibly deleting non-business data minimizes future productions for legal and regulatory requests, including the often significant eDiscovery labor and costs for identification, collection, processing, and costly downstream attorney review. Whether during the immediate eDiscovery response or as part of an initial plan for better proactive preparation and ongoing compliance, StoredIQ can offer corporations immediate cost savings and ongoing risk avoidance.” – Katey Wood, Enterprise Strategy Group

StoredIQ Defensible Data Deletion – Key Phases

Phase 1 – Identify: Find data at a granular level; understand its current and potential business value across your enterprise including within: Content and Records Management Systems, Email, SharePoint, Desktops/Laptops, and Archives.

Phase 2 – Manage: Classify data according to retention and disposition policies, and compliance mandates including: PII, PCI, FINRA, Dodd-Frank, Legal hold, Aged /obsolete data, and Non-business data.

Phase 3 – Act: Manually or automatically take corrective action to: Protect, Delete, Expire, Migrate, Store, and Optimize data.

To learn more about StoredIQ’s Defensible Data Deletion solution, stop by the StoredIQ booth at LegalTech — #214 — download the Defensible Data Deletion solution sheet, or email us at info@storediq.com.

The growing volume and greater dispersion of data, new methods of collaboration, and the emergence of new internet-based applications pose their own challenges to finding and utilizing information most effectively. Combined with legal, regulatory, and privacy directives, data governance has become an increasing challenge for enterprise organizations. A new white paper from Enterprise Strategy Group addresses how corporations can turn Information Governance from a priority into reality.

Take action. Start governing.

This paper addresses some of the most common use cases for deploying information governance solutions including: eDiscovery, Compliance, Storage Optimization, Data Mapping, and Data Migration—focusing on the immediate ROI and long-term impact. Download the ESG whitepaper and take a step toward actionable information governance:

• Determine what data you have and where it is
• Clean-up trash and de-duplicate data
• Analyze contents and access patterns to determine appropriate policy
• Migrate data to the appropriate storage tier for greater cost efficiency
• Enforce policy for retention and deletion, potentially expiring what’s beyond usefulness or mandated compliance retention

‘Boil-the-ocean’ approaches stall many information management projects. Companies can gain more immediate near-term benefit and ROI by tying actionable information governance to other high-priority large-scale IT initiatives. Tackling an immediate and acute project like eDiscovery or regulatory response, storage optimization, or records management initialization can be an opportunity for ‘go-forward clean-up’ by adding elements of good information governance and better data management.

– Katey Wood, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group

The ESG whitepaper is available from the StoredIQ website at www.info.storediq.com/esg

For information about how StoredIQ can provide actionable information governance solutions for eDiscovery, records management, compliance, and storage optimization, email info@storediq.com.

Seeing growing customer demand for eDiscovery, Records Management, and Compliance solutions for cloud-based data, StoredIQ has announced support for cloud-based Exchange and SharePoint residing within Microsoft Office 365 (formerly Microsoft Business Productivity Office Suite – BPOS). With this extended capability, Microsoft Office 365 customers can utilize StoredIQ to gain the same deep visibility and understanding of their cloud-based email and SharePoint data as they do with StoredIQ’s on-premise information governance solutions.

Customers, including a major U.S. car manufacturer, are using StoredIQ to quickly connect to Microsoft Office 365 to identify, collect and manage Exchange email and SharePoint data for responding to eDiscovery requests, applying records policies, and adhering to regulatory compliance mandates. As a result, StoredIQ provides enterprises with actionable information governance solutions to realize the benefits of cloud computing while still fulfilling their legal and compliance requirements.

According to 451 Research, cloud computing continues to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent and will reach $16.7 billion in revenue by 2013.

As enterprises continue moving data to the cloud, information governance challenges are becoming more complex. StoredIQ’s Platform connects to Microsoft Office 365 and indexes its data, combining the ability to identify, collect, and manage cloud-based data for legal discovery and records management into an integrated information governance application as a means of preempting litigation and reducing potential legal risks associated with cloud data storage.

– David Horrigan, analyst, eDiscovery and information governance at 451 Research

As a way to minimize storage costs and IT investments, we are seeing more and more customers move data to the cloud. Whether on-premise or in the cloud, StoredIQ can provide a highly scalable solution for governing all enterprise data and ensure that data placed in the cloud is discoverable for litigation, regulatory inquiries, and records retention scheduling.

StoredIQ’s support for Microsoft Office 365 includes:

• Identification and collection of data from both Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online
• Integration with Active Directory
• Auto–detection of both mailboxes and SharePoint sub-sites in the cloud
• Connection throttling to Microsoft Office 365 in order to maximize network efficiency
• Managed security and access, along with automatic activity and chain–of–custody reporting

For more information about our actionable information governance solutions – for on premise or cloud-based data – please email info@storediq.com.

According to an article by Mark Brunelli, Senior News Editor with SearchDataManagement.com, a growing number of organizations are realizing that data governance is more important than ever and will take center stage in 2012. Based on a SearchDataManagement.com 2011 Reader survey, 77% of respondents either have, or are planning to implement, a data governance program – a 9% increase over last year.

In the article, Brunelli interviews Sunil Soares, director of information governance with IBM’s software group. According to Soares, “It’s [information governance] a trend that shows no signs of slowing as 2012 approaches. The increase in awareness can be attributed to business users who are at last taking ownership of data. In other words, organizations have realized that data problems are business problems.”

Similarly, according to the 2011 eDiscoveryJournal and ViaLumina Information Governance Survey, most people view information governance as an umbrella for multiple disciplines including eDiscovery, records management, security, compliance, storage and archiving, risk management, and privacy. The majority of survey respondents revealed that they are investigating Information Governance and actively working to determine how to apply it to their organizations.

As 2012 looms near, new regulatory mandates such as FINRA 4511 and 4512, and the Dodd-Frank Act put a renewed focus on the need for information governance solutions. Fred Pulzello and Sonali Bhavsar wrote in an article for Information Management magazine, “Companies that proactively invest in establishing information governance policies, procedures, and technology will improve the efficiency of their compliance programs and will be in the best shape to adapt quickly to the new rules and regulations and manage the risks associated with doing business in this environment.”

StoredIQ provides actionable information governance solutions, enabling organizations to gain visibility and control over business-critical information to meet their eDiscovery, records management, compliance, and storage management requirements. With StoredIQ, legal, records managers, compliance officers, or IT can utilize a suite of purpose-built applications that arm them with the information intelligence needed to minimize the cost and risk of governing the ever increasing amount of unstructured data stored across the enterprise.

As 2012 approaches we’d like to know, what are some of the biggest information governance challenges your organization faces? eDiscovery, Storage Optimization, Compliance, Records Management? With StoredIQ, information governance doesn’t have to be a boil the ocean approach; ROI can be attained through existing IT and compliance initiatives, or trigger events like eDiscovery or regulatory response. So as you plan your 2012 information governance initiatives, there is great value in knowing what data you have and where it resides, whether the efforts are reactive or proactive, or apply to legacy data or new policies. Use of information intelligence technology like StoredIQ is critical to informing, improving, and maintaining adequate data governance.

1. I’m thankful that my Information Governance technology can orchestrate all my ESI better than a professional chef can orchestrate a gourmet Thanksgiving feast.
2. I’m thankful that the eDiscovery for this court case didn’t cost me an arm and a (turkey) leg.
3. I’m thankful that my eDiscovery solution helps me settle legal arguments quicker than I can settle family disputes at the dinner table.
4. I’m thankful for “fat pants” after eating a Thanksgiving dinner that makes Big Data look small.
5. I’m thankful that it’s easier to organize my electronic information than it is to organize who’s bringing which dish to Thanksgiving dinner.
6. I’m thankful that mapping my data is easier than teaching Great Aunt Thelma to use a Garmin to map her way to my house for Thanksgiving dinner.
7. I’m thankful that unlike football, my eDiscovery solution makes holding legal.
8. I’m thankful that I have an Information Governance solution sophisticated enough to let me find all my data—just like finding one person in the midst of the Macy’s Day Parade.
9. I’m thankful that I know the difference between spoliation of evidence, and spoiled leftovers.
10. I’m thankful that finding my ESI isn’t as hard as finding cranberry sauce at the grocery store on Thanksgiving morning.

Happy Thanksgiving from StoredIQ!

I recently read an article in LTN, authored by Evan Kobletz, covering the Guidance product announcement – “Guidance Adds Data Re-use Feature to EnCase eDiscovery”. After some discussion at StoredIQ, we’re actually pretty excited about the coverage. It sheds light on capability that we’ve had for years now, and probably don’t talk enough about. In fact, the article also highlights several competitors that still don’t have it. The StoredIQ term for ‘Data Re-use’ is ‘Incremental, Single-Instance Collection’, but setting aside semantics, we believe it’s a fundamental component for conducting thorough, legally sound eDiscovery collections.

What does this mean to eDiscovery customers? The first time a file is relevant to a case, we’ll take a forensically sound copy and place it on a retention server for preservation with a litigation hold tag specific to the given matter, without altering the metadata and without interrupting end users. If it’s an ongoing case, we’ll perform incremental collections – meaning that we’ll only get another copy if that file has been changed (or if other new relevant files are created). When another case crops up, and the same file is once again relevant, StoredIQ is aware that the file is already on retention and instead of taking the time, bandwidth and storage space to collect another copy StoredIQ just places an additional hold tag on the file. If your company is in a highly litigious industry or has a number of serial litigants, you can imagine the savings this can add up to over time. Only when all matters for a given file are concluded, and the obligation for legal hold is removed, will the file be available for disposition from the repository.

Possibly because StoredIQ has had this capability for quite some time, we’ve taken for granted that incremental, single-instance collection is a standard feature of any intelligent eDiscovery technology that has a collections component. And more importantly, a feature that eDiscovery customers should consider closely. Note that the article also mentions that this feature also enables users to “search collection sets from previous litigation”. That statement alone makes me wonder how many case collections have been jeopardized by not having the capability to search and produce data from the preservation location used by previous and simultaneous, on-going cases?

On a broader scale, in the LTN article, Kobletz, states, “Data reuse is a growing trend in the e-discovery industry.” We at StoredIQ actually see ‘data reuse’, to use the same term, as a trend that goes well beyond eDiscovery. The same data that your legal team needs to identify and collect for a legal matter, is also the same data that your records management team needs to classify, your IT team needs to store and manage, and your compliance officers need to govern. At the end of the day, your corporate data is all being ‘re-used’ by multiple departments – not just the legal team for multiple matters.

What companies need is the ability to identify, classify, manage, and act on their data assets – to provide value across the entire organization. That’s something you won’t get from Guidance, or any point solution eDiscovery product. At StoredIQ, we’re focused on delivering powerful information governance products that can provide the comprehensive data insight and control that corporate counsel, compliance managers, and  records managers need to make the best and most informed decisions, while meeting the stringent requirements that IT departments demand.

Records Management, unfortunately too often sometimes seen as an expensive and necessary evil, is actually a solid starting point to realize bottom line financial gains, and minimize legal risk. According to a 2009 study by IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

Content and records management systems can provide very powerful control over information, but they offer little value if content never makes it into the system. This is the Achilles heel of records management – requiring users to go through a manual filing process that they perceive as having little value to them. As a result, work-in-progress files and other content languish in unmanaged environments such as shared drives and desktops – out of sight and out of control. Realizing the increased legal and regulatory risk this presents.

Leveraging the deep data insight and control that we’ve brought to the legal department, StoredIQ’s new records management application, RecordsIQ, gives records managers the necessary data intelligence to identify, manage and clean-up corporate records. However, And unlike other solutions in the marketplace, RecordsIQ provides in-place analysis and classification of data without requiring knowledge worker involvement. By empowering the records management team to defensibly delete data, corporations can significantly reduce legal and compliance risks, and yield tangible ROI in the IT storage budget.

RecordsIQ is designed to address a wide range of records retention, disposition and management requirements.  By integrating an easy to use records management application with the power of the StoredIQ platform, records managers have a single solution to make informed decisions about the business value of their enterprise data, while increasing operational efficiencies and reducing risk and cost.

Key features of RecordsIQ include:

• Data topology map provides a clear understanding of data across the enterprise to facilitate appropriate data retention and disposition decisions
• Records management workflow streamlines the management of records policies across the enterprise
• Identification and classification of records according to business-value and pre-defined requirements
• Automatic execution of electronic records policies by taking action on data including copy, move, or delete based on records policies
• Defensible deletion of records with no business value by automatically destroying documents in compliance with corporate disposition policies

RecordsIQ is available now, to learn more:

• Download the RecordsIQ data sheet
• View the RecordsIQ video overview
• Email info@storediq.com

Every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. — Eric Schmidt, Google

Data, it’s at the heart of every StoredIQ customer problem – whether it’s eDiscovery, records management, compliance or storage management. Knowing where data is, mapping data, finding data, organizing data, deleting data, moving data…corporations today have a Big Data problem. The results of an IBM survey will come as no surprise to many corporations struggling with daily data management. The recent survey of 1000’s of CIOs found that insight and intelligence about Big Data was their #1 priority over the next 3 years. The acceleration of Big Data and the host of challenges it brings to corporations is why StoredIQ has launched a new online community dedicated to addressing the Big Data problem.

Big Data Bytes Community

Big Data Bytes is an open community and thought leadership blog that provides new information and insight into how to reduce the risk, cost and complexity of managing Big Data. Authored by Phil Myers, chief executive officer, and Tom Bishop, chief technology officer, at StoredIQ, the blog presents current and relevant data “bytes,” focused on creating a conversation about the technologies, trends and business use cases that are driving the revolution in business pertaining to Big Data. The blog can be found at www.bigdatabytes.com.

Big Data Bytes is a valuable resource for those concerned with managing the ever-growing influx of data. With support from our industry advisory board experts, our main aim is to share stories we hear and see about the innovations and breakthroughs that are happening in Big Data. The blog is an open platform for timely, thought-provoking exchange with a community that represents a broad range of industries, and shares the goal to stay abreast of market changes, product requirements, as well as industry dynamics and growth. We hope that you’ll subscribe to the Big Data Bytes community, and start sharing your own Big Data bytes.

StoredIQ’s unique approach to conducting early case assessment on data “in the wild”, has been recognized by analysts at IDC as a market differentiator in their 2011 MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications Report. The report evaluates the capabilities of early case assessment (ECA) vendor solutions and is designed to help CIOs, corporate legal counsel, compliance officers, and legal service providers understand the key capabilities, the evolving use cases, and market and technology dynamics for the early case assessment solutions and the broader eDiscovery market segment. Among the twelve vendors included in the report, IDC positioned StoredIQ as a leader in the standalone ECA space, a market forecasted by IDC to total $400.8 million in 2011 and reach $857.0 million in 2015.

According to IDC, “Customers cite StoredIQ’s ability to enable the analysis and culling of data at the source prior to preservation and collection as a key differentiator.” IDC goes on to say that StoredIQ “Boasts highly rated indexing, search, and retrieval performance, and the ability to scale. Customers that are looking to search and analyze the universe of content prior to collection highly rate StoredIQ’s ability to scale, as well as StoredIQ’s search and retrieval performance.”

IDC’s recognition of StoredIQ as a market leader validates our innovative and novel approach to conducting ECA prior to preservation and collection. Our powerful ability to perform early case analysis on data where it natively resides gives legal counsel the ability to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning the matter far earlier in the eDiscovery process. Unique among evaluated vendors, StoredIQ’s approach yields a much stronger ROI as data is identified, understood and culled where it lives in the enterprise rather than after costly collections, culling and processing in a central location.

StoredIQ’s early case assessment offering is part of the company’s DiscoveryIQ application. Product strengths and key differentiators identified by IDC include:

• Ability to directly connect to and search a variety of data sources including: major messaging systems (Exchange, Notes/Domino), distributed endpoints, network file shares, export files, major archival and storage systems (EMCCentera, Hitachi HCAP, IBM FileNet, IBM Information Archive, NetApp Snaplock, Symantec Enterprise Vault), content management systems (EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet), and Microsoft SharePoint (including wikis and blogs in addition to document libraries), and laptops/desktops.
• Ability to enable the analysis and culling of data at the source, prior to preservation and collection.
• Highly rated indexing, search and retrieval performance, as well as the ability to scale.
• Ability to perform real-time what-if risk/reward assessments utilizing the DiscoveryIQ application. Based on different culling decisions, customers can see a real-time “scoreboard” provide updated estimates of review costs for a given data set or case.
• Streamlined workflow designed to enable IT and the legal users to collaborate throughout the eDiscovery process.

To learn more about StoredIQ’s Early Case Assessment solution:

• Download an excerpt from the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications Report
• Download StoredIQ AnalyzeAnywhere Technology Brief
• Email info@storediq.com

Historically, performing legal holds has been a very manual and labor intensive process. Spanning multiple systems, it was time consuming to administer, almost impossible to track, and relied heavily on custodian self-preservation. StoredIQ’s integrated hold notifications with intelligent data collection, as part of a comprehensive eDiscovery workflow creates a holistic and legally defensible process which eliminates the burden on custodians, improves efficiency, and reduces legal risk.

Vivian Tero, Program Director for GRC Infrastructure, IDC

The importance of an integrated legal hold solution recently came to light in Treppel v. Biovail Corp., 249 F.R.D. 111 (S.D.N.Y. April 2), which states that a standard “litigation hold” memo to company employees is not enough. As soon as litigation becomes a reasonable possibility, a potential litigant must act quickly to identify potential sources of evidence, and act to preserve that evidence.

Though it is important to notify potential custodians of their duty to preserve data, the true value of a legal hold solution is the ability to then take action on custodian data. This is why we’ve seamlessly integrated the legal hold workflow with DiscoveryIQ, StoredIQ’s eDiscovery application. Companies can ensure compliance with case law, initiate hold notifications, track acknowledgements, perform early case assessment across all matter relevant data, and perform single-instance collection to a secure retention platform.

For a complete list of Legal Hold features, download the StoredIQ Legal Hold Technology Brief, visit our Legal Hold site, or email info@storediq.com.