E-discovery, or the process by which electronic documents and information in response to a pending legal action are searched for and obtained, has historically been in the realm of problems that people don’t want to look for. When it comes to the question of how to get their arms around all the data that could be a liability, IT hasn’t had an answer — so it hasn’t asked. The prospect of crawling individual files systems, network storage devices and email servers to create an index of data, with the CIO and legal department breathing down IT managers’ necks, was bad enough. But the real elephant in the room has been legacy backup tapes.

Many organizations have elaborate schedules for taking backups and supporting restores of short-term data, but most have a subset of backups that end up off-site for perpetuity. And for a large percentage of companies, these are still on tapes.

The prospect of having to recall, restore and search these archived backup tapes in response to pending litigation is truly a nightmare scenario for most IT managers.

Fortunately, there is a solution available that can address this problem. Index Engines has recently rolled out a cloud e-discovery service that will search, index and recover files from legacy backup tapes for less than it would probably cost a company to do it themselves — assuming the company has the time, personnel and infrastructure available.

This service, called Look and Learn, starts with clients shipping tapes to the Index Engines facility (or have them sent by the archiving company), where they’re scanned and indexed without being restored. This index is then put online for the client to review and decide which (if any) files are needed to support their pending litigation. The people that review these data are often from different organizations (outside legal firms) and geographically dispersed, making the cloud the perfect medium for this service. When the required data is identified, copies can be ordered from the appropriate tapes and sent to the client. And after the project is complete, the index can be retained online for as long as needed to support future discovery requirements, and the tapes are sent back to the client’s archive.

The technology for this process was developed by Index Engines and has been sold as a software solution to companies themselves and for use by e-discovery service providers. This new cloud e-discovery implementation brings the solution to a larger group of potential customers, many of which haven’t been involved in legal discovery activities of electronically stored information in the past. For IT managers in these organizations, and the VARs that support them, the Look and Learn service can be the answer to a question that’s not getting asked.

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Since all documents (essentially) are now electronic, at least the current ones, companies are required to search their own infrastructures for these pieces of data that used to be in the file cabinet. Given the ad hoc nature of most organizations’ storage infrastructure and the disorganized state of the data itself, finding the documents that they’re legally bound to produce is a daunting task.

Originally a legal issue, discovery has moved into the IT realm, since IT now controls the storage of corporate records. This process is called e-discovery. The first e-discovery tools that were available to IT came straight from the legal world and weren’t terribly efficient. They weren’t designed for the volume of data that IT deals with and didn’t understand the IT applications that really controlled a lot of the data — email and backup.

For the past several years, VARs have tried to approach their IT customers with solutions to address these e-discovery needs. This has been pretty unsuccessful, largely because the e-discovery tools available weren’t up to the task. There’s a new category of tools we’re calling IT discovery, which were developed for IT to meet e-discovery requirements effectively.

In future posts, we’ll drill down more into IT discovery and look at what this technology holds. We’ll also look at how it’s positioned to succeed where e-discovery products didn’t, and provide a solution for VARs looking re-engage with companies about this potential liability.

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