Cobalt Iron Compass Makes E-Discovery Faster and Easier

Part of the Cobalt Iron Patents blog series

With most business records being created and stored digitally, electronic discovery (or e-discovery) has become a fact of life for today’s enterprises. If you’ve ever had to produce data to meet a legal or regulatory obligation — say, to prove compliance or provide evidence for an investigation — then you know how important effective, disciplined e-discovery is. There’s just so much data, so the ability to find what you need when you need it requires sophisticated technological tools.

Fortunately for Cobalt Iron Compass® users, the platform maintains extensive and verifiable data discipline to all data it protects. In addition, Compass is being enhanced with patented e-discovery techniques that help fulfill e-discovery requests more quickly and cost-effectively when searching for data in backup storage that matches certain criteria.

Why You Need It

In today’s business and regulatory climate, it is essential for enterprises to be able to respond to e-discovery requests in a timely, comprehensive, and cost-efficient manner. Backup data sets, which typically contain copies and versions of all key corporate data, are among the largest data targets for e-discovery searches in most enterprises. Performing e-discovery data searches on this enterprise backup data can be complex, time-consuming, and very costly. Enterprise data custodians struggle with balancing the demands of legal e-discovery requests against the challenges and costs of performing the searches against so much data.

What It Will Do

Compass will use Cobalt Iron’s novel, patented techniques to expedite e-discovery in backup data, including:

• Extracting and indexing detailed metadata (such as data or file object name, type, owner, location, age, size, creation time, last modification time, etc.) from a backup data set to facilitate e-discovery
• Efficiently identifying a subset of data within a backup data set based on metadata associated with an e-discovery request
• Preserving a native file format and a chain of custody for each data item in a backup data set identified by an e-discovery request
• Applying e-discovery and backup policies to data identified by an e-discovery request
• Automatically preserving e-discovery data that is about to be deleted or modified within a backup data storage

What It Means for You

Cobalt Iron’s e-discovery techniques give corporate data custodians insights and efficiencies that make it possible to manage e-discovery requests more effectively while introducing new levels of data discipline. Preserving native file formats, maintaining a chain of custody, and applying e-discovery policy for each data item identified by an e-discovery request greatly simplifies the arduous tasks associated with regulatory compliance.

Ready to up your e-discovery game? Contact us!