Simon leads CommVault's Information Access & Management business including Information Risk, eDiscovery, Compliance and Information Search.

Over the last 20 years he has worked for many large multi-national while building deep expertise in a range of topics including business intelligence, data warehousing, application and information management.

Most recently, Simon has gained specific experience in data retention and archiving, working for or with some of the leading companies in this field to gain specialist knowledge in information risk and compliance.

Bridging the Gap Between eDiscovery and Information Governance

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Guest post from Emily Wojcik, Product Marketing Manager

Back in 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) amendments changed the way we litigate in this country. The amendments broadened the scope of discoverable material with the inclusion of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and forced us to call early attention to electronic discovery issues including accessibility and methods of production. While the amendments opened the door for more cross-functional communication, the message and surrounding market hype was largely about risk. What about gaining a broader understanding of our information assets and transforming that intelligence into tangible business value? Where does that fit in the scope of eDiscovery? Does it at all?

At CommVault, eDiscovery is part of our overall vision and overarching, singular philosophy to the broader Information Governance (IG) market. Others agree. Industry groups such as ARMA and its record keeping principles are addressing how to meet Information Management specific challenges by establishing a set of best practices for "good" governance in recordkeeping. The EDRM now has a specific reference model for IG that offers guidance to bridge the gap between IT, Legal, Compliance, Records Managers and other stakeholder groups within organizations. Even Gartner is stressing the importance of eDiscovery as just one part of an overall IG schema.

On the heels of the release of Gartner's eDiscovery Magic Quadrant, it makes me wonder if these broader challenges are being fully represented. Its publication certainly tells us that eDiscovery is a pain that is not going away and each organization, large or small, must take action to address it. We feel our position confirms that we are formidable players in the eDiscovery market. We've proved that we are the only single-platform approach that can compete with disjointed and fragmented solutions in this era of market consolidation. With one product, CommVault offers integrated eDiscovery from the industry's broadest collection of data sources, including archive and backup data from email, files, SharePoint and more. That's a future-friendly feature that's pretty important as we enter a new digital era that is characterized by desktop/ laptops and other mobile devices at the "edge." With data being aggregated from social media, scale-out file systems and public and private clouds, customers need a smarter methodology to bring data collection and review under control. CommVault's ContentStore offers just that with a single index and a single point of management that lays a forward-thinking foundation for eDiscovery actions like data mapping, ECA's and legal holds to reduce risk and control both in-house and third-party costs.

With that said, I wonder if there are other aspects to the story that are worth another look. Our idea of a good governance strategy is holistic. It links backup and archive pools of data together with a common platform. This strategy lays the foundation for more extensive business intelligence and includes tight integration to wider-reaching information management capabilities like deduplication, enterprise search, content management, data mining, reporting, analytics and retention optimization. With knowledge comes power so embedding capabilities like these into one organic, integrated solution that's at your fingertips maximizes the investments in hardware, software and staffing and allows you to extract more value out of the data your business creates every day. This is what makes CommVault's approach so comprehensive and a bit of an "apples-to-oranges" comparison to other traditional, pure-play vendor approaches to just eDiscovery.

I like how CommVault has decided to address customer needs from a singular approach. What about you? Do you need a quick, targeted response to an eDiscovery situation because the clock is ticking or are you taking your time to future proof your business against next-generation Information Governance needs? What will the impact of both options be down the road? Share your thoughts with us.

Emily Wojcik is a Product Marketing Manager at CommVault.

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