The Cloud and e-Discovery

Benefit #1: The Cloud Scales Up and Down With More Cost Efficiency

One of the key advantages of cloud computing today is the speed at which you can customize the environment to suit changing business needs. In a more traditional data center environment, that's not necessarily the case.

As an example, imagine that you have a project that has an unexpected need for an additional 10TB of storage, but you don't have 10TB available and the project is time sensitive. In a traditional data center environment, this would mean evaluating storage options, creating purchase orders, delivery and installation, and configuration of storage systems ' all of which is time-consuming and may interfere with your ability to win a case. Even with the best intentions, this would likely take a couple of weeks for implementation.

In a cloud environment, an information-on-demand requirement of this size can be achieved in less than 15 minutes. You simply provision the type of storage that you want, in the region that you want, and you are done in a matter of minutes.

Due to the cost model of cloud computing, you typically only pay for what you use, on a per-hour basis. This has clear advantages when your imaginary 10TB project completes, because you simply securely wipe and decommission the storage and cease paying for it. When we consider scalability, we naturally think about scaling up, but with the cloud environment we can also consider scaling down in real time. This is potentially important for your organization with respect to project-specific matters, overall data management efficiencies and even performance. In these instances, having the ability to scale down can prove helpful in saving significant costs when your needs decrease.

Should you need more processing power at short notice, additional IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) can be provisioned for the time that you need it. Again, it can be scalable both for increase and decrease as business needs require. In addition, as hosted platforms (like your hosted document review tool, for example) are typically scalable, that service, too, can be scaled up and down in addition to servers and storage.

While our hypothetical 10TB example is storage, the same holds true for servers. Imagine you need five new servers, all running an enterprise version of SQL, to perform some advanced analytics. With cloud capabilities, this can be provisioned in a matter of minutes, instead of the weeks other methods might take, and cloud scaling doesn't require additional software or hardware purchases. Again, once the project has finished, the servers can be decommissioned, and you no longer have to manage the additional environment or bear the cost for its now-unused servers and storage.

Benefit #2: The Cloud Is Useful For Much More than Purely Data Storage

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one type of cloud technology that provides virtualized computing, along with software (and typically storage), as opposed to a platform where you just buy storage. A good example would be your firm's document review platform. Ultimately, this can help your organization save significant costs by negating the need to make capital expenditure.

Benefit #3: You'll Know Exactly Where Your Data Is Being Stored

There is often significant misunderstanding about the physical location of where data is stored in a cloud environment. Many times, I have heard people say they don't want their data held in an unknown location. Moreover, there are organizations today that still prefer the more traditional data center environment because they have strict compliance restrictions that dictate data stay in a certain jurisdiction or country.

Cloud service providers are aware of this and offer services where you can actually specify the location of your data upfront. It is indeed possible to know the physical address of the data center where your data is stored. Yes, data center . Your data can remain in one, centralized location, not dispersed over 15 different countries and 100 different servers. Cloud storage has to happen somewhere, right?

Generally, you can select your preferred geographic storage location for an additional fee. Because of that, though, if you are planning a migration from a traditional data center to cloud services, it is important to consider where you want to house your data before migrating, as changing after the fact can be time consuming and incur additional costs.

Benefit #4: The Cloud Addresses Disaster Recovery As Effectively As a Traditional Data Center

Disaster recovery is a serious consideration when creating an infrastructure for e-discovery services. Due to the nature of cloud services, thousands of servers are constantly available on demand to recover from any disaster, with the ability to preconfigure the replication of servers as an automated process if the worst happens. This is similar to the technology used in more traditional data centers, but cloud options are typically technically more robust, providing more options and a stronger focus to meeting stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As cloud providers compete for your business, SLA performance is commonly used as a significant differentiator.

Benefit #5: The Cloud Can Provide Sophisticated Encryption

Almost daily, we hear about corporate networks being compromised and personal or client information being exposed and often sold on the dark Web. Law firms and corporations generally take a risk-assessment approach, and leaving personal or client data exposed is a business killer. How can organizations reap the significant benefits of cloud services while minimizing risk?

In some cases, fully homomorphic encryption can be utilized, which encrypts data at the source and is never decrypted in processing (essentially, the data is processed in an encrypted state, with results being returned, still encrypted). For a cloud-based document review environment, encryption-at-rest can be utilized.

When data is moving across the network, this typically utilizes encryption-in-motion (also known as encryption-in-transit), but when the data in a specific location is generally static, encryption-at-rest creates additional protection for your already secure environment. Essentially, this means that even if the data is compromised or exposed, the contents of the data require a secret, secure key to unlock them. These layers of encryption, which cloud deployments commonly leverage, make using cloud computing for e-discovery purposes a realistic option.

HIPAA, HITEC and other regulations that are designed to protect personally identifiable information (PII) can be addressed in a cloud environment, as well as the protection of client sensitive business information with the use of this sophisticated technology. Conversely, more traditional data centers often encounter challenges when trying to offer this type of encryption, granting cloud options a significant edge.

Benefit #6: Your Cloud Is Always Monitored

Yet another significant advantage to migrating to the cloud is that large, established service providers administer around-the-clock security teams to constantly monitor their systems for attacks and proactively update best practices, which as a client of theirs, you inherit. Remember, their performance is typically measured against SLAs, so it is certainly in a cloud service provider's best interest to provide clients an excellent level of service, which includes security. The benefits of a 24/7/365 sizeable team of security specialists is a significant advantage when engaging cloud computing service providers to administer your infrastructure or storage environment.

If your organization performs its due diligence, evaluates these benefits and seeks the cloud platform that best suits your needs and those of your clients, you will position yourself well for a successful outcome.

David Greetham is vice president of e-discovery operations of Ricoh Americas Corporation. He is a Certified Fraud Examiner and is also a former member of the Association of British Investigators and Digital Forensic Research Workshops (DFRWS). Greetham has testified as an expert on numerous occasions, and notably provided testimony in the landmark Coleman Holdings v Morgan Stanley case.