It is important to review the history of e-discovery’s move to the cloud, As background, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt began evangelizing the cloud as early as 2006. According to Steve d’Alencon, Chief Marketing Officer of e-discovery vendor CaseCentral, 2006 also witnessed corporations beginning to view e-discovery as a strategic business process. He added: “CaseCentral has been delivering its software as a service since 1994, essentially pioneering the notion of cloud-based eDiscovery. When the cloud paradigm began to gain traction, we were already prepared to take advantage of this shift due to our SaaS-based architecture. As a result I decided to go all-in on the cloud from a marketing perspective, and even trademarked the term ‘CaseCentral eDiscovery cloud.’”
Source: CaseCentral Case In Point
Boeing, for example, a CaseCentral client, centralized its e-discovery in-house while still working closely with outside counsel. Boeing thus achieved consistency and efficiencies the absence of which previously made e-discovery much more challenging and dispersed among outside counsel using different technology platforms.
The Underpinnings of the Cloud
Before we turn to the topic of security in public and private clouds, it’s worth examining the
various elements of the cloud computing model.
The cloud model itself is a three-tiered structure based on (1) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS); (2) platform-as-a-service (PaaS); and (3) software-as-a-service (SaaS). Infrastructure and software are particularly important for corporate counsel to master.
Provisioning infrastructure from a third-party cloud vendor allows corporations to take advantage of processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources on which its computers can run software, including platforms, Operating Systems, and applications.
As the National Institute of Standard and Technology definition of the cloud makes clear, “[t]he consumer does not manage or control the underlying infrastructure, but has control over what to deploy on it. An example of IaaS is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Source: rswallpapers.com
Corporate counsel must have an intimate understanding of—and must help define from the start—their corporation’s business and IT strategies in this area, particularly the nature of their company’s cloud infrastructure.
via Electronic Discovery: The Imperative of Private Clouds – Forbes.
