Follow the data

It used to be "follow the money." But with electronic data discovery in litigation, "follow the data" is more appropriate. Vendors like Renewdata are doing just that, for current and historical data with ActiveVault and Symantec's Enterprise Vault.

Renewdata's ActiveVault 4.0 was released last month. With the new version, companies can send their historical data to Renewdata's hosting service. They will aggregate the data into an active vault and make it available for clients to manipulate it with litigation holds and retention policies. In the event litigation ensues, self-service, early-case assessment tools are also available for customers to do some forecasting. When customers want the data back, Renewdata can return it on demand and per customer requirements in a variety of formats for CT Summation, LexisNexis Concordance, and Microsoft Exchange.

The self-service tools available for ActiveVault 4.0 are delivered through a Web browser interface. On the good side, there is nothing to install on the local machine to access and manipulate the archive on ActiveVault -- that also reduces training requirements. On the bad side, there are no APIs for ActiveVault to interoperate with existing applications like policy management and data retention tools. That is on the road map.

I will look forward to the APIs for interoperability. Until then, Renewdata is forging partnerships such as the the recent agreement with Symantec.

Renewdata and Symantec announced a service to migrate and consolidate historical e-mail into a Symantec Enterprise Vault. This "Data Migration Service for Symantec Enterprise Vault"  migrates and consolidates historical e-mail and creates a centralized repository for legal discovery matter.

The service aims to convert, load, and index historical data from backup tapes and direct the output to an Enterprise Vault. Data can be extracted from removable media. Then e-mail and file data are de-duplicated; static operating system and application files are also eliminated. The fully processed data is is than stored in an Enterprise Vault archive which is then returned to the customer’s Enterprise Vault system as a turn-key offering for litigation support.

When you follow the data, e-discovery providers like Renewdata are not only servicing ongoing litigation needs, but also providing proacitve litigation tools that allow companies to engage in risk managment practices with historic data, using a hosting model with self-service tools.