Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights?
From: Steve Werby <smwerby () VCU EDU>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:42:50 -0500
Valdis, I agree completely. I explicitly excluded planning, data collection and all processes that precede it from the scope of my inquiry because those are issues that need to be addressed over a longer time horizon and which require the time and cooperation of numerous constituents. So I'm focusing on issues I can address near term. Given our combination of tools, capabilities and staffing, it's just not feasible for us to handle difficult-to-predict perceived potential near-term demand for e-discovery processing, searching, analysis, review and production. Adding staff to meet this need is unlikely. An e-discovery platform would likely help, especially if legal counsel could be trained to utilize it for at least some phases of the process. And services from third-party providers is an option I can't rule out. If there are other feasible options to consider, please share. By the way, I'm a Virginia Tech grad so I know all too well about the unfortunate event you were referring to. It might help me persuade my colleagues to make the pre-collection issues a higher priority if I could share some hard numbers about the potential impact for a large-scale e-discovery case and efforts necessary to reduce the impact. But from a risk perspective, I suspect an incident like that would be perceived as an unlikely worst case scenario, along the lines of a tornado taking out our primary data center and our secondary data center a mile from it. Who would be the best person to speak with concerning that - Wayne, Randy, someone else? -- Steve Werby Information Security Officer Virginia Commonwealth University VCU Information Security - http://infosecurity.vcu.edu/ News, Tips & More - http://www.twitter.com/vcuinfosec Best Practices - http://infosecurity.vcu.edu/docs/infosecbp.pdf On 2/26/2010 3:51 PM, Valdis Kletnieks wrote:
On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:11:25 EST, Steve Werby said:Do you have experience or insights about e-discovery platforms that cover all phases of the process after data collection (processing, searching, analysis, reviewing, production, etc.)?Insight: If you wait till after data collection, you've made your work about 63.4 times harder than you had to. You *really* want to sit down and do some up-front work to make the back-end work easier. A few years ago, we had an unfortunate incident on campus, where we literally ended up doing the first steps of data preservation while still in lockdown. The fact we weren't ready for it beforehand, combined with a legacy tape system that used 40G tapes, conspired to leave us holding the bag on some 18,000 tapes. We're *still* dealing with the fall-out from that - by the time we're done we'll have easily blown 10 man-years on it. And that's before we've actually handled a single e-discovery request. Moral: You *really* want to look at your ongoing business practices, and see where you can make things simpler for when things go bad...
Current thread:
- e-discovery software and outsourcing insights? Steve Werby (Feb 26)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights? Eric Case (Feb 26)
- Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights? Valdis Kletnieks (Feb 26)
- Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights? Walters, Caroline (cw8de) (Feb 26)
- Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights? Steve Werby (Mar 10)
- Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights? Steve Werby (Mar 10)