By John Patzakis and Charles Meier
Corporate mergers and acquisitions are complex enough on their own — but when a deal involves the divestiture of an entire business unit or a carve-out of specific departments, the stakes for separating data correctly and efficiently become even higher. Legal and IT teams must identify and surgically separate emails, documents, and other unstructured electronic information to ensure that the right data goes to the acquiring party — and that what must be retained remains secure and compliant with privacy and legal requirements.
This data separation exercise is notorious for being time-consuming, extremely expensive, and highly disruptive. This is because traditional methods require heavy lifting by IT teams and service providers, endless back-and-forth with custodians, and mass data collections that literally double the risk. Worse yet, Microsoft Purview, with its known throttling and low throughput challenges for M365 data, is not up to the task for data separation matters that invariably involve at least dozens of terabytes. These inefficiencies all lead to severe regulatory risks, runaway costs, and critical delays.
There is, however, a far better way — X1 Enterprise. Several major corporations have recently employed X1 Enterprise in high-stakes data separation matters. Once completed, the comments from our customers are the same: There was no other way they could have done it without spending millions of dollars on time-consuming and disruptive services.
Data Separation Is Not Just Another eDiscovery Project
Unlike standard eDiscovery, a divestiture-driven data separation project must carve out large volumes of live, operational data while the business continues to run. Legacy tools and processes require copying and moving the entire subject data set to a separate repository for indexing and searching — adding huge costs, time delays, and operational risk.
X1 Enterprise’s game-changing advantage lies in its distributed micro-indexing architecture and true index-in-place capability. This unique approach allows organizations to instantly search, categorize, and separate or otherwise remediate massive volumes of data where it resides — without duplicating and exporting entire data sets to third-party servers for processing.
In practical terms, this means:
Lightning-Fast Search: X1 Enterprise creates lightweight, local micro-indexes on endpoints and servers across the organization. Search results come back in seconds, no matter where the data lives — on laptops, file shares, or cloud repositories such as M365.
Minimal Disruption: Because the data stays in-place, there is no need to duplicate or move sensitive content, minimizing the risk of data leakage, avoiding the bottlenecks that come with data copying and migration for centralized processing, and enabling the actual remediation to be infinitely more effective by working on the live data set. How do you execute data separation when you are working off a stale copy of the data for the categorization effort? The short answer: Up to millions of dollars in manual services to go back to the “original data” and manually separate the data for each employee and their respective data sources.
Scalability and Control: Whether the divestiture involves hundreds or thousands of custodians across geographies, X1 Enterprise scales seamlessly while giving legal and IT teams centralized control and real-time oversight.
Defensible Process: Legal teams can generate audit trails, reports, and logs to demonstrate a precise and defensible chain of custody, which is critical for regulatory and contractual compliance.
The Bottom Line: Much Faster, with Dramatically less Cost and Risk.
When time is money — and delays can put entire deals at risk — organizations cannot afford cumbersome, legacy eDiscovery workflows for carve-out data separation projects. X1 Enterprise’s innovative architecture empowers legal, compliance, and IT teams to execute precise data separations faster, with dramatically lower cost and business impact.
For any organization facing a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, X1 Enterprise is not just an upgrade — it is the modern standard for high-stakes data separation and governance.
Learn more about how X1 Enterprise can streamline your next M&A project. Schedule a demo today at sales@x1.com or visit www.x1.com/solutions/x1-enterprise-platform