Digital White Papers

GETTING GROUNDED IN CLOUD E-DISCOVERY What should an organization consider regarding moving e-discovery to the cloud? Caroline Sweeney: For our firm, a primary consideration had to do with the potential to lower — or maintain — the cost of our litigation support infrastructure internally. We have a very robust litigation support/e-discovery platform in-house. When we look historically at our investments in hardware infrastructure, software licensing and personnel to support the application, it's literally millions of dollars, albeit over several years. The question becomes: Is there a more cost-effective way to manage the solution for the firm? In addition, as a firm providing e-discovery services to clients, it is critical we have access to state-of-theart technology. We need the ability to continually invest in the platform and have current or nearcurrent versions of software. One of the challenges I face when submitting internal budget approvals for a software upgrade is I'm competing against all sorts of other IT projects. I've been lucky and have been able to upgrade every couple of years, but the fact is, while we upgraded two years ago, we're already four releases behind on our current software. Another consideration is scalability. In terms of infrastructure, the cloud provides easy access to add storage, processors, etc. There's also easy access to scalable staffing resources; so rather than staffing to peak capacity needs, we can use the cloud provider for additional staffing resources as needed. The cloud solution also provides us with access to a technical staff that is more knowledgeable about the software product than our internal IT group. These experts are able to help us troubleshoot and resolve issues quickly. That is another important factor for us in terms of moving to the cloud. Mark Browne: Caroline's points broadly overlap the consideration points and experiences we're having in making the migration. There are just a few things I would add. Moving e-discovery to the cloud, we can differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market. It's an advantage if we're partnering with the bestof-breed cloud provider — one that can give us the software and service delivery we would otherwise have to invent and build from the ground up internally. Combined with our existing talent and processes, it advances our capabilities in the eyes of our clients. We've also had to consider giving clients assurance we're keeping them in mind and putting their interests first. This includes things like security, the process model and the way we're going to interface with that third-party provider to make sure client confidentiality is kept at all times. All these concerns generally fall under the risk management bucket. A key area of focus is making sure client data are kept safe when outside our firm's walls. If we can rely on a third-party provider that already has security measures and processes in place, we can demonstrate confidence to our clients that this is how things will go every single time. The primary objective for us is to provide a seamless experience for our users. We want to provide the same level of service or better by making the move to the cloud. We don't want technical issues to impact the way our users interact with the system or the kind of service delivery our technical and project management staff provide our end users. Before migrating to the cloud, how did you evaluate the security components? Caroline: We had our vendor complete a rather lengthy security evaluation, very similar to the security evaluation some of our clients have us complete when providing data to our firm. We also addressed the disaster recovery considerations. As part of the evaluation period, we looked at accessibility, license management and data transfer,

• Cover