A Discontinued Blog

A farewell from 1TERM for the moment - as my duties no longer allow me the luxury of updating 1TERM as it should be (no post for months now). Any further attempt to create content would just have this blog turn into a corporate mouthpiece - and there is enough of that. So for all who have read this blog - thank you.

I'll see you when I see you.

Autonomy Purchases Iron Mountain's Digital Assets

In what is regarded as the recognition of their failure to expand into digital records management, Iron Mountain has sold their digital assets - which include Mimosa and Stratify - to Autonomy for $380 million. With 5PB of data under management - Iron Mountain had been a major player in the market to store information. Now, Autonomy will add those to include over 25PBs of data under management in the world's largest private cloud.

Consolidation of the unstructured data market is inevitable (there are just so many niche players) - and with Autonomy having already raised $500 million last year for a purchase - the company is in prime position to capitalize on a number of technically strategic but financially floundering companies.

With the rationalization of the archiving/e-discovery/data storage markets I believe that the few big players left standing will be able to have the economies of scale necessary to efficiently and safely provide business critical processes in the cloud. We have seen that the recent push to move IT infrastructure outside of the corporation to be sustained demand and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

The Cloud is sexy. And ours just got a lot bigger.

E-discovery and Social Media

I was just reading through this post over at Drug and Device Law and there seems to be no shortage on how people are approaching Social Media. Lawyers (and their 3rd party affiliates) are friending people on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn to gain access to potentially relevant information. Everyone is trying to find their footing in this whole new playground of evidence. Of particular interest to me is how people can now download all of their information on Facebook and the increase in rich media as a result:

Another thing that potentially makes plaintiff e-discovery easier – at least from Facebook – is the recent addition of an option by which a user can download to a “zip” file all the material, whether text, videos, or photos, that a user (presumably the plaintiff) has ever placed on his/her page. 

This has now opened a new portion of e-discovery - that which can emphasize photographic and video evidence as much as traditional text. 300 million people are on Facebook - and they are on there to share photos and videos. E-discovery will need methods to efficiently cull this data without wasting a lawyer's time (imagine being in the office watching videos of a lifetime's worth of vacations).

Indexing pictures/video is a difficult process and relies on some antique methods of tagging - think how YouTube relies on user categorization. This can lead to significant inaccuracies. Something I've seen recently from Autonomy is the ability to use pattern-matching technologies to build an understanding of content within pictures - a more advanced version of how Facebook suggests tags now in their photo section. The really interesting application of this technology comes in video. Autonomy can use pattern recognition to determine who is in a video - and can do so in real time! E-discovery can not only be reactive, but in-house counsel can now use the same technology to ensure they are litigation ready.

Check out more details from Autonomy here, better yet feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn here.

Harry Potter Newspapers

Some image recognition technology is making Harry Potter-like newspapers a reality. Check it out on YouTube here.

The application for this in the advertising realm seems ridiculous to say the least. In terms of e-discovery, image pattern recognition (and video recognition) will be increasingly important as well. For now, enjoy the video and hopefully I'll be back soon as I learn more. 

Exploding Data Growth

The NY Times’ Shelly Podolny ran a recent opinion piece on the growth of information. Particularly troublesome was the cost of information overload which was estimated to be in the “…hundreds of millions of dollars yearly.” According to the NY Times:

The current volume estimate of all electronic information is roughly 1.2 zettabytes, the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century… More stunning: 75 percent of the information is duplicative. By 2020, experts estimate that the volume will be 44 times greater than it was in 2009.

And it is in the business world where all of this data is continuously being stockpiled – mainly because doing so seems easier than figuring out what is permissible to delete.  There are other costs associated to information hoarding as well, costs like e-discovery which can add up to millions of dollars every year on top of settlements due to it’s prohibitively expensive nature.

As internet usage expands in volume, this problem faces both Wall Street and Main Street:

…it’s not the giants like Google or Amazon or Wall Street investment banks that are responsible for creating the data load on those servers — it’s us. Seventy percent of the digital universe is generated by individuals as we browse, share, and entertain ourselves…

Podolny asserts that no matter what we do, “…improvements in the digital highway usually just lead to more traffic…” But here at ZL we believe that is a fallacy. ZL believes in smarter traffic.

By reducing duplicative information within organizations, storage footprints can be reduced by over 75 percent. Using proven methods like stubbing, single-instancing and SaaS, we believe in a further reduction of IT capital expenditures while preventing the hidden costs of rogue data.

On top of this, ZL can categorize and (most importantly) delete data based upon the content or metadata. This puts real teeth to a retention schedule and means that there is even less information being stored.

Less processing power storing less information means smaller server farms, reduced energy consumption, and a decrease in a corporation’s carbon footprint.

As Podolny asserts, “No one wants to give up the pleasures and benefits that the digital domain provides.” With smart information management, no one will.

The Case against Gmail

I love Gmail. The features, UI, and integration of this service are second to none. I even use Gmail as my main e-mail client for non-professional use. However, Gmail cannot be used in the business world for one reason: it is not 100% reliable.

Yesterday, Gmail users have been reporting a huge problem – that all of their emails, labels, themes, folders and settings had been erased. According to Google, this may affect .29% of the Google Mail database. Although this seems like a trivial amount (29 out of every 10,000 mailboxes), the loss of any mailboxes at all to a corporation is substantial.

What if one of the lost accounts happens to be a C-level executive or a custodian in an eDiscovery case? I know of no IT or Legal department would want to be traced to that problem. We all know how important e-mail is for day-to-day business. And imagine how indefensible it would be to explain that Google lost all of your evidence.  A day after the issue was reported, the Google engineering team is still “investigating”.

According to one blogger cited on HuffPo, “”It is clear from the Gmail forums and Twitter that hundreds if not thousands of people have had their Gmail accounts compromised. A firm believer in the concept of cloud computing, it never occurred to me that my Gmail account could one day disappear.”

Cloud service providers will always have this problem – even Google can’t guarantee everything. You can check the status for the issue on Google’s forum here.

ZL’s Unified Archive will make sure this never happens for any company. While Gmail may lose e-mails forever, ZL’s e-mail archiving allows end-users (or only admins) to restore anything from single messages to entire mailboxes. In the case of user-error or disaster, everything is recoverable.

SAC Capital: Caught in the Act

According to the Wall Street Journal, two former hedge-fund managers from SAC Capital Advisors have been acting quite suspiciously lately – one even took his computer drives apart with pliers and deposited the left-overs in four different garbage trucks around NYC. In testimony, the offending manager, Donald Longueuil, explained in very colorful language that, “It’s all f—in’ ripped apart. Everything’s gone.”

That is one way to enact a retention policy.

Mr. Longueuil had been reacting to this WSJ article about a federal probe into insider trading. Now, there’s no way to tell how SAC Capital manages their electronic data, but I am sure that no compliance officer is happy when someone is ripping up hard drives by piece.

“When people frantically begin shredding sensitive documents and deleting computer files and smashing flash drives and chasing garbage trucks at 2 a.m. … it is not because they have been operating legitimately,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

This is a prototypical case of why companies cannot allow end-users to manage the retention of their data – they are allowed to break the law and destroy the evidence. Prosecutors will not be kind to such a poorly governed company. Already the government has been broadening the scope of the investigation into SAC and its partners.

In this case specifically, SAC Capital could have benefitted from e-mail and file archiving to ensure that they keep a copy of all business-relevant data from their computers. With this information they could have proven Mr. Longueuil to be an isolated manager who went off the reservation. Instead, they will be at the center of an expanded federal investigation.