Making cloud eDiscovery possible

Law suits, particularly between businesses, are endemic these days, and one of the key components of building or defending against such suits is the process of eDiscovery, locating and managing data relevant to a case – or a defence – from the all the data available on the internet.

This ability to discover relevant data is also increasingly vital when it comes to the increasingly important areas of business governance and compliance.

It is to this that information management specialist, Nuix has applied its development skills to give Customers can apply the massively scalable processing power of services such as Amazon AWS, Google Compute and Microsoft Windows Azure to discovery, compliance and governance in the cloud.

Nuix has developed the ability to apply massive eDiscovery processing power on demand by adapting the Nuix Engine, which is designed for processing and indexing very large volumes of unstructured data , so that it now runs as a massively parallel environment on popular cloud computing infrastructures.

“Through our growing Intelligent Migration business, we are helping customers move hundreds of terabytes of data to cloud services and govern that data”

This now enables customers to conduct rapid, large-scale eDiscovery indexing, searching, case assessment and export in the cloud. Crucially, processing can take place within cloud environments such as Microsoft Office 365, without having to move it or download it behind the firewall.

The goal is to follow the data. An increasing amount of it is now being held in the cloud, and so it becomes essential for businesses and lawyers to be able to conduct eDiscovery and investigative search in the cloud, alongside the data.

The company has developed the ability to spin up any number of virtual instances of the Nuix Engine and assign eDiscovery processing tasks to each one. This is currently possible on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure and is in development on the recently launched Google Compute environment.

“Through our growing Intelligent Migration business, we are helping customers move hundreds of Terabytes of data to cloud services and govern that data,” said Eddie Sheehy, CEO of Nuix. “But a serious question remains about what happens when it is subject to Discovery.

“Courts are rejecting the argument that discovery is an undue burden even in Big Data cases that involve hundreds of Terabytes or more. Unless you can apply massive processing power to digital evidence in the cloud where it is stored, even with relatively small volumes of data, meeting deadlines at a reasonable cost is impossible.”