Guide ediscovery in the Cloud

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NetApp eDiscovery in the Cloud 1

eDiscovery in the Cloud

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As business documentation has gradually moved from being

stored in hard-copy, paper formats to a purely electronic

form, the process of legal discovery has evolved into

electronic discovery, or eDiscovery.

In this e-book we’ll take a close look at eDiscovery, how the

cloud is changing the way that it works, and what NetApp’s

Cloud Volumes ONTAP can do to help companies manage it

in the cloud.

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Executive Summary 2

From a Traditional Legal Process to a High Tech Challenge 4

A Growing Field 5

eDiscovery in the Cloud 5

The Benefits of eDiscovery 6

eDiscovery Cloud Migration Challenges 7

Cloud Onboarding 8

Accessibility 9

Data Protection 10

Costs 10

How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Supports eDiscovery Cloud Automation 11

Cloud Volumes ONTAP Benefits 12

Conclusion 13

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From a Traditional Legal Process

to a High-Tech Challenge

More and more business documentation is now electronically-stored information (ESI). As such, discovery—the exchange of information by parties in a legal case with the intent of using the information as evidence—has become eDiscovery. ESI in eDiscovery can include many types of documents, such as email, electronic documents, social media posts, instant

A process that was handled by sorting through boxes of

hard-copy files has now become increasingly virtualized.

messaging, smartphone application data, and proprietary company databases.

The eDiscovery process is highly IT-centric, with large volumes of structured and unstructured information having to be identified, preserved, and collected so that it can be transferred in a compliant manner to the other party for processing,

review, and analysis. eDiscovery clearly requires significant store resources. eDiscovery also requires significant compute resources when advanced data review and analytics technologies are applied to automatically extract legal insights from the ESI corpus.

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A new market has emerged to provide eDiscovery tools and eDiscovery platforms as well as managed eDiscovery cloud services for law firms and other eDiscovery stakeholders. The

global eDiscovery market was valued at just under $11 billion in 2018, and is expected to grow to $17 billion over the next five years. Although today the prevailing eDiscovery solution deployment model is still on-premises, eDiscovery is migrating to the cloud. In the next section we’ll look at the opportunities and challenges involved in the adoption of cloud computing for eDiscovery.

eDiscovery poses significant challenges for IT for law firms and for any organization that must govern its ESI to comply with eDiscovery law requirements and other regulatory purposes. Those IT challenges include:

• The need to collect, store, and manage large quantities of diverse data, along with its metadata and history.

• The fact that as much as 40% of enterprise data is created and stored outside of the enterprise network, such as on mobile devices and in cloud applications. Because of that, such data may not be captured by legacy eDiscovery tools or processes.

• The ESI corpus may lie dormant for long periods but must be easily, quickly and reliably restored when needed. In addition, compute resources must be made available to process, review and analyze the ESI.

• IT teams both in the law firms and in the organizations required to maintain ESI often do not understand the special infrastructure and network needs of eDiscovery.

+ $1b

per year

growth by 2023

A Growing Field

eDiscovery in the Cloud

Traditional ESI Sources

• Hardcopies

• Physical data center • Company records

New ESI Sources

• Large quantities of data • Metadata

• Disparate network, including the cloud

• Personal devices

$11b

market value

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The Benefits of eDiscovery

eDiscovery in the cloud, whether IaaS or as part of a hosted service, addresses many of these IT challenges. Cloud-based workflow management platforms today can help automate and orchestrate eDiscovery, and support more robust, less error-prone eDiscovery processes. In addition, the organization benefits from reduced data storage costs in general, and for archived data in particular. Last but not least, ESI that is stored in the

Given the growing complexity of virtualized data, eDiscovery

gives law firms and organizations a way to track, protect, and

document important resources by leveraging the cloud.

cloud is easier to make available when it is needed outside the organization for eDiscovery purposes.

For law firms, eDiscovery in the cloud streamlines their review and analysis workflows, while eDiscovery data residing in the cloud can be available and easily accessed from any location and from any device.

For both the organizations and the law firms involved in cases, eDiscovery in the cloud frees up their IT teams from having to deal with specialized eDiscovery infrastructure and network needs. In addition, eDiscovery stakeholders can reduce their data center footprints and CAPEX costs while benefiting from the cloud’s on-demand elasticity and scalability.

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eDiscovery Cloud Migration Challenges

Despite the many advantages of eDiscovery in the cloud, it is not without its challenges. Initially, the security of ESI data in the cloud was considered a barrier. However, the cloud service providers as well as managed service providers are continuously and heavily investing in their security and compliance profiles; today sensitive data from many highly regulated sectors, including healthcare and finance, are routinely held in the cloud.

When it comes to eDiscovery in the cloud, the main challenges are:

Costs

Accessibility

Cloud

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The initial migration of ESI from on-premises storage facilities to the cloud can be a considerable task. Although the various cloud service providers offer migration solutions, transferring large volumes of data can be both costly and time-consuming. In addition, it is critical that data and metadata integrity be upheld during the migration. Otherwise, the organization may find itself in breach of its eDiscovery obligations.

• AWS Database Migration Service and Azure Database Migration Service

Moves databases into the cloud.

• AWS Import/Export Disk, Azure’s Import/ Export service , GCP Storage Transfer Service Moves large amounts of data into the cloud over the internet.

• AWS Storage Gateway / Azure StorSimple Connecting on-prem storage systems to cloud storage.

Cloud Onboarding

Migration Tools

• Ruggedized Storage Transfer

AWS Snowball, AWS Snowmobile, Azure Data Box. and GCP Transfer Appliance can be used to physically transfer data in the exabyte-scale to a new location.

• Open-Source Utilities

Using open-source tools such as rsync and Rclone to get data to the cloud.

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The ability to serve NFS and SMB / CIFS in order to meet the demands of both Unix/Linux and Windows-backed eDiscovery workloads.

There are a number of different file service solutions available in the cloud. For the most part, these managed services can serve either the SMB / CIFS or NFS protocols, but not both. An eDiscovery process that needs to access data using both Windows-based systems and Linux-based systems may encounter a limitation in choosing just one of these services.

Accessibility

Fully-Managed Cloud File Services

Amazon EFS and FSx

An NFS and an SMB solution, respectively. Azure Files

SMB file services GCP Cloud Filestore NFSv3 file services

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As noted above, the public cloud infrastructure is well secured. However, this does not exempt the owners and the users of ESI from upholding their end of the cloud’s shared responsibility model for data protection. The organization’s data protection and governance processes must be adapted accordingly and support recoverable snapshots as well as Disaster Recovery and backup copies.

The strengths of the cloud lie in its infinite store/compute scalability and its frictionless, on-demand elasticity. However, without clear end-to-end visibility and careful management,

cloud infrastructure budgets can soar out of control.

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How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Supports

eDiscovery Cloud Automation

NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a data storage management platform that runs as an instance on AWS or Azure. It enhances and optimizes the cloud provider’s native data storage services by adding a layer of data protection features as well as data storage efficiencies. Cloud Volumes ONTAP also supports all the cloud file-share protocols (NFS v3/4, SMB v2/3, iSCSI, NDMP).

Storage

Economy

Data

Protection

Data

Migration

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• Data Migration: For on-premises NetApp users, Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s data replication tool SnapMirror®

makes it easy to migrate large volumes of ESI data to the cloud. For other users, NetApp’s Cloud Sync service can securely, quickly, and automatically move ESI data to the cloud from any repository.

• File Services: NAS-based file shares in the cloud with dual protocol support for NFS as well as SMB / CIFS. • Enhanced Data Protection: Cloud Volumes ONTAP

leverages NetApp’s unique and highly-efficient Snapshots™ technology to create backups with virtually no additional storage overhead. These Snapshots serve as the basis for the seamless DR process.

Some of the features and benefits that Cloud Volumes ONTAP brings eDiscovery stakeholders include:

Cloud Volumes ONTAP Benefits

• Immutable cloud WORM copies via SnapLock®. WORM copies protect ESI data from loss or spoliation, and are always easily restorable when needed for eDiscovery. • Smaller Storage Footprint: With its data compression

and deduplication capabilities, as well as its thin provisioning feature, Cloud Volumes ONTAP can reduce cloud storage footprints—and costs—by as much as 70%. • Automated Storage Tiering: Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s

storage tiering feature automatically moves cold data

to lower-cost object storage on Amazon S3 or Azure Blob and automatically moves it back into Amazon EBS or Azure managed disk storage when accessed for eDiscovery processing.

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Conclusion

The deployment of eDiscovery in the cloud is a growing trend due to its strong value propositions for both the owners of ESI data as well as the law firms that use that data in their eDiscovery processes. Cloud Volume ONTAP’s enterprise-grade data storage management platform adds even greater value to cloud-native store services across many verticals and use cases, including eDiscovery.

To help you get started with cloud-based eDiscovery, NetApp is now offering a 30-day trail of Cloud Volumes ONTAP absolutely free. Sign up for your free trial now.

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