Massive Data Centralization for MS 365 Does Not Work for Enterprise eDiscovery and Information Governance Workflows

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

CIOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance programs like defensible deletion, data migration, and data audits to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that. Many CIOs attempt to address this daunting challenge by migrating disparate data from around the global enterprise into a central location. However, they quickly find that such attempts to “boil the ocean” are extremely expensive, highly disruptive, and unworkable due to massive scalability issues. The HP Autonomy vision was an example of this approach that seemed like a good idea, but never scaled and required significant manual effort and expensive outsourced services to execute.

And history is repeating itself with Microsoft’s Purview eDiscovery platform. MS Purview Premium is a very expensive add-on designed to mine data in Microsoft’s 365 platform for eDiscovery collection and export. However, MS 365 is a massive data ocean that was not purpose built for compliance and eDiscovery. Furthermore, a new “compliance index” must be created with data carved out of the MS 365 ocean to initiate an eDiscovery or compliance case in Purview eDiscovery to ensure proper and complete content indexing.

As a result of this disjointed two-step process, users are encountering significant problems with low throughput and defensibility. Many customers report to us that Microsoft Purview Premium’s documented inability to handle anything other than small matters due to their 2GB per hour throughput limit. A matter involving 100 custodians at 10GB of MS 365 data would take several weeks to complete with Microsoft Purview Premium.

X1 Enterprise Collect is not subject to these limitations due to our MS 365 data connector approach supported by the X1 proprietary search technology. X1 Enterprise Collect can complete the same sized matter within 24 hours (search, collection and export) better meeting the needs of eDiscovery and investigation matters and requiring only an E3 level M365 license.

Purview Premium faces other key limitations such as not searching files and attachments over 150 MB, not addressing hidden mail folders, and not accessing files and emails without “compliance copies” and overall challenges with search syntax and search reliability and accuracy. In response to these challenges, Microsoft Purview customers are being forced to spend significant sums on outsourced service providers who, just like in the Autonomy days, are engaging in substantial efforts to make the process work. We have spoken to several eDiscovery service providers who are giddy over all the work they are getting to compensate for Purview’s limitations with outsourced services. However, in-house legal teams are not happy with the situation.

In response to these challenges, X1 launched MS 365 data connectors to our X1 Enterprise Collect platform to provide a previously unmet critical need for enterprises to conduct cost-efficient yet highly scalable eDiscovery search and collections of MS 365 data. The response has been tremendous, with X1 seeing record demand.

X1 Enterprise Collect provides users the unique ability to search and collect MS 365 data in-place, in a targeted and iterative manner, at speeds and throughput far exceeding other tools, including Microsoft Purview Premium. X1 achieves such scalability through a targeted, custodian-based approach that minimizes 365 API calls, and does not rely on the MS Search Index, which has been demonstrated to be untrustworthy and with limited throughput. X1’s approach enables a very scalable, defensible, and robust data collection now at speeds 10x that of other approaches.

The X1 Enterprise Collect Platform is available now from X1 and its global channel network in the cloud, on-premise, and with our services available on-demand. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/x1-enterprise-collect-platform.