Earlier this month, Microsoft eDiscovery expert Rachi Messing, who manages Microsoft’s Office 365 eDiscovery platform, headlined a webinar hosted by D4, LLC, where he provided extensive insights into Microsoft’s compliance and eDiscovery strategy and the company’s strong dedication to the effort. X1 also presented and discussed the integrated workflow of Microsoft Office 365 (“O365”) with X1 Distributed Discovery.
The adoption of cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 (“O365”) within enterprises is growing exponentially. The majority of enterprises have adopted O365 or plan to do so in the next two years. Microsoft provides an integrated eDiscovery capability as a module in O365, and is dedicating a lot of effort and resources to it in order to provide a go-to solution for the eDiscovery of all information located within O365. Messing noted that “the world of work is changing and Office 365 is a major force for this transformation.”
Messing also recognized in his presentation that effectively addressing eDiscovery within O365 is essential to facilitating cloud adaption. This is I think a very important point. The significant cost-benefits associated with cloud migration can be negated if an efficient and effective eDiscovery search and retrieval of that data is not available or is overly cumbersome. By providing such an eDiscovery capability within the O365 Security and Compliance Center, Messing correctly believes that this will encourage wider and faster adoption of Office 365.
Microsoft is making a lot of advancements with O365 and will continue to do so. However, Messing acknowledged a key gap, as while most organizations that have adopted O365 have done so while keeping a lot of data on premise, such as on desktops, fileshares, and on-premise SharePoint. Messing pointed to X1 Distributed Discovery as a solution to systematically address the on-premise data and non-Microsoft cloud sources that contain electronically stored information which need to be preserved and collected from.
X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) is uniquely suited to complement and support O365 with an effective and defensible process and has distinct advantages over other eDiscovery tools that solely rely on permanently migrating ESI out of O365. X1DD enables organizations to perform targeted search and collection of the ESI of up to thousands of endpoints and other sources, all in a unified fashion. The search results are returned in minutes, not weeks, and thus can be highly granular and iterative, based upon multiple keywords, date ranges, file types, or other parameters. Using X1DD, non-O365 data sources are searched in place in a very targeted and efficient manner, and all results can be consolidated into Microsoft’s O365 review platform or another review platform such as Relativity. This approach typically reduces the eDiscovery collection and processing costs by at least one order of magnitude (90%), and provides a very effective and complete eDiscovery capability for hybrid O365 and on-premise environments. X1DD is also a very effective migration and information governance platform to facilitate enterprise-wide transitions to O365.
You can review a recording of this webinar here. And for a demonstration or briefing on X1 Distributed Discovery, please contact us.