Peer to Peer Magazine

38 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2016 CASE STUDIES Maximizing E-Discovery ROI with Cloud Hosting Equally apparent was our firm's need to understand the return on investment involved in maintaining our e-discovery tools, data and staff resources. We quickly realized our choice regarding data hosting would go a long way in determining our ROI outcomes. We explored hosting options with three requirements in mind. Should a major disaster happen, the solution we chose must keep our data: » Accessible » Secure » Recoverable When I joined Stoel Rives as the Litigation Support Manager a few years ago, it took no rocket scientist to see that litigation data for e-discovery was growing at an exponential rate. by Aaron Pippin, Sr. Maximizing E-Discovery ROI with Cloud Hosting AARON PIPPIN Aaron Pippin has been in IT for the last 16 years, 10 of which have been involved with e-discovery. He is currently the Sr. Manager of Litigation Technology Services for Stoel Rives, where he establishes and manages e-discovery tools, policies and best practices for the firm. Aaron holds a Master of Business Administration and has been a certified Project Management Professional for the last 11 years. Contact him at aaron.pippin@stoel.com. Here are the three data hosting options we considered. Option 1: Manage Physical Infrastructure In-House Our first option was to continue owning the physical environment and install a review tool. With multiple factors to consider to fulfill our requirements, this option proved to be expensive. » To store the data properly, we would need to rent space in dual data centers in different areas of the country, with the second data center used as a failover for disaster recovery. » Making room for the additional data would mean purchasing additional disk space for both locations. Since the block size of disk space is purchased in set increments, portions of the disk would not be used right away, resulting in wasted space. » Having physical servers would require someone to go onsite to both data centers to aach and configure the new storage. All of this would be time-consuming and costly. And because physical hardware for data centers only lasts around three-to-five years, our IT department would need to budget for a new storage system regularly. Additional costs were associated with maintaining dual data centers, such as power, cooling, manpower and soware licensing. These numbers added up to an extremely low ROI. Option 2: Work With a Third-Party Provider Our second option was to contract with a third-party vendor to host the data and provide all resources needed to manage and support the environment. This option makes sense for many law firms since it reduces the cost and risk associated with hosting the data internally. While the overall cost might be higher when compared

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