Unified Repository: A Solution to the Challenges of eDiscovery

 Unified Repository: A Solution to the Challenges of eDiscovery

Understanding the roots of the time-consuming eDiscovery procedure and how a unified repository can help

Every time a case is filed, the eDiscovery procedure appears out of nowhere, only to be followed rigorously by the teams necessitating a repeat of the same time-consuming fact-finding process, often consuming 50% of their time every week. And every time they do, they question the foundation of eDiscovery and wonder why it wasn't based on well-managed data. Despite this, many legal and IT professionals fail to appreciate the importance of well-managed data in the eDiscovery process: legal because attorneys seldom understand corporate storage architecture, and IT fails to perceive how well-managed data helps the eDiscovery process.

Nonetheless, eDiscovery for litigation, governance, risk, and compliance necessitates timely, accurate, and defensible responses to electronic data demands. But that is not usually easy as business data is frequently stored in data silos, making eDiscovery a tricky and cumbersome process. Moreover, the low level of eDiscovery results is slow, limited, and expensive, impacting the length of time necessary for intensive early analysis and document review. And that is terrible news for businesses already under legal pressure to react quickly to eDiscovery requests, frequently raising the question of why.

Why managing data for eDiscovery is tough?

The vast majority of eDiscovery requests will need the usage of older information from archives or backups, which are typically stored on an out-of-date application server known as a legacy system, which is challenging to navigate in and of itself. When you combine the legacy database migration with old email programs, file systems, file sharing, enterprise content management (ECM) software, and other unstructured data formats accessible from various vendors, you have a disaster. Additionally, data is frequently unstructured, created by hundreds of different applications, and kept in multiple locations worldwide. Moreover, it is challenging enough to identify and obtain vital data, and keeping it safe becomes even more difficult. Furthermore, even when the legal department engages with IT to better safeguard information, transferring data to a secure eDiscovery software repository generates several copies of data and may interfere with business activities.

In a nutshell, this extremely diverse data environment offers significant hurdles when seeking to acquire relevant material for eDiscovery and compliance. In today's fast-paced commercial and legal climate, searching all this data on an ad hoc basis is very restrictive and rarely acceptable. Therefore, the need for a unified repository.

The Unified Repository

The key to overcoming these obstacles is to devise a way to bring together the bulk of responsive data in a single physical or virtual repository using an adequate enterprise data archiving solution. Physical repositories necessitate corporations investing in a new archive infrastructure, but virtual repositories necessitate technology such as indexing, which presents its own set of issues. However, any eDiscovery solution with a unified repository outperforms the traditional way of conducting multiple searches across networked servers, backup tapes, and custodial hard drives.

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