Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst

Initially available as a software solution, the Index Engines unified discovery platform can be implemented in the enterprise IT infrastructure and run in the background to create and maintain an index of corporate data for legal discovery purposes. The Index Engines platform is also the technology foundation for many eDiscovery service providers which engage with law firms and companies facing litigation. Now Index Engines is leveraging the cloud to make this technology available as a direct service to handle the discovery process on legacy backup tapes.

Look and Learn customers ship their tapes to Index Engines’ facility, or have them sent from Iron Mountain or a similar offsite repository. Each tape is then scanned and a content index is created and hosted online by Index Engines. Since the process doesn’t need to restore each tape first, costs can be surprisingly low - starting at $50 per tape. The customer reviews the index to support their discovery requirements and then can order the appropriate data sets be restored. The Full Extraction option produces complete ‘re-duplicated’, ‘de-NISTed’ tape content delivered in the native format. Customers can also choose the Query-based Extraction option which delivers only relevant files or data objects based on content and metadata queries.

After the current project is complete, tapes are shipped back to the customer’s repository, but Look and Learn can also host the index for an extended period of time if desired. When additional restores are required in the future, customers can use the index to identify which specific tapes are involved, then mount the tapes and extract the relevant files and email.

Most engagements involve current or pending litigation and must include inside and outside counsel, meaning people from different locations have to share information about the same corporate data sets. The cloud’s ability to bridge geographies enables these groups to have controlled access and easily determine which data they need restored. It can also make the distribution of restored files easier.

Litigation can affect companies of any size and require even those without a sophisticated IT infrastructure to find and produce large quantities of files. For many companies this means a formidable project, going through boxes of old backup tapes. The Look and Learn service enables these companies to fulfill their legal requirements and support their own defense effectively, at a low cost per tape.

Storage Swiss Take

The cloud seems to be seeping into everything, but this looks like a very good application of cloud technology. Look and Learn is a service that encompasses data storage, data processing and data delivery, making the cloud ideal for hosting the infrastructure needed to implement it. But the cloud is also an enabling technology, as it makes this service available to a much wider group of potential users, particularly those facing the daunting task of searching and restoring legacy backup tapes.