Peer to Peer Magazine

40 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2016 CASE STUDIES Maximizing E-Discovery ROI with Cloud Hosting to hosting internally, the third-party vendor takes on the responsibility of delivering accessibility, security and disaster recovery. However, you need to consider legacy maers when contracting with a third-party vendor; while these maers might not be active, they still take up storage space. A vendor could also charge for project management time to maintain and manipulate the data or databases. To allow for more predictive costs and ROI, many third-party vendors are moving to a flat-fee arrangement. Overall, the costs for option two are still higher than option one, so we moved on to consider a third option. Option 3: Deploy to the Cloud Our third option –– the one Stoel Rives adopted –– was to take advantage of the latest technology by deploying a review tool and hosting the data in a cloud environment. Taking advantage of virtualized servers and a pay-for-use model allowed us to develop a highly resilient environment that easily meets our expectations of high availability, security and redundancy. The vendor of our cloud environment offset our risk, and we looked to their service-level agreements to determine the level of uptime we could promise our clients. Our cloud environment provided assurance that if the servers go down, our vendor could have them up and running within a four-hour window to allow us to reconfigure our environment. Since the servers are virtualized, a network engineer can add more storage by logging in to a Web console and provisioning additional disks. Within a few minutes, the new storage can be added and configured for use. The environment also handles load-balancing and failover with ease. If one zone goes down, the other automatically picks up the slack and allows reviewers to continue working with lile to no disruption. For disaster recovery purposes, data are synced regularly to an East Coast location. Should the entire West Coast location go down, our IT department can manually switch over to the East Coast and bring up a new review environment within a day. Additional Considerations We also considered data backups in determining our ROI. A backup takes up storage but is infrequently used, and the cloud option allowed us to select a lower-cost storage option. We can now back files up locally and maintain a mutually exclusive copy in a third-party environment should something happen to our primary environment. Encryption keys are held by the Stoel Rives NetOps department, so the cloud provider does not have access to the data. This level of control allows Stoel to determine who can access the data and monitor aempts to gain unauthorized access. Requirements Met in the Cloud Cloud technology allowed Stoel Rives to reduce our overall costs and increase ROI through the elimination of periodic network-aached storage (NAS) upgrade purchases, use of the pay-for-use model and reduction of overhead to maintain the environment. Stoel's NetOps team can now focus on more important aspects of the environment, such as architecture, proper Option 1: Manage In-House • Pro: Physical security and redundancy • Con: Costly, IT resource hog Option 2: Third-Party Providers • Pro: Frees up IT resources • Con: Often more expensive than in-house Option 3: Cloud Service • Pro: Pay-for-use model, resilient • Con: Requires strong encryption practices DATA HOSTING OPTIONS: THE PROS AND CONS

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