You are here: Home / Archives for SaaS

Strategy: SaaS and E-Discovery | InformationWeek Reports

November 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

SaaS and E-Discovery: Navigating Complex Waters

As SaaS applications become the norm at most enterprises and more and more business data is stored in the cloud, companies are becoming accustomed to evaluating SaaS and cloud providers around key areas such as the security and long-term storage of their data. But they also must consider how their SaaS applications will be affected by e-discovery, the process by which enormous quantities of electronic information are searched and analyzed in the event of a lawsuit.

Is the information you’ve stored on the cloud provider’s premises freely accessible to you? Can it be retrieved on demand, in sufficient quantity and within tight deadlines? Are mechanisms in place to ensure that potentially relevant material isn’t being deleted? Even more important, are you confident that information you thought was deleted is actually gone? Are you ready to stand in front of a judge and prove it?

These questions are best asked of a SaaS provider before an e-discovery event occurs, particularly if you are dealing with cloud apps for e-mail, Office documents and business records, all of which are popular targets of opposing counsel.

Many of the criteria that should be used to evaluate a SaaS provider are also relevant to e-discovery. This should make it simpler to determine whether a SaaS provider can meet e-discovery-specific requirements in a few critical areas, such as the ability to apply legal holds to certain data sets, and to retrieve large volumes of data quickly and in a usable format.

We’ll examine how e-discovery requirements align with many general SaaS considerations, and also discuss features and capabilities specific to e-discovery that IT and legal teams should ensure can be met by a provider. We’ll also review the basics of the e-discovery process, and provide guidance on the use of SaaS-based e-discovery services as a complement to, or alternative for, premises discovery tools. (S2550211)

continued @  InformationWeek Reports ::Strategy: SaaS and E-Discovery.

Filed Under: From The News, Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Gartner Releases First Magic Quadrant for E-Discovery Industry

May 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This Magic Quadrant for e-Discovery aims to help CIOs, general counsel, IT professionals, attorneys, compliance staff and legal service providers understand the dynamics and landscape of the market for e-Discovery software.

 

To be included in this Magic Quadrant, a vendor must sell enterprise software licenses, a software appliance, or SaaS conforming to Gartner’s definition of SaaS. As well, vendors must also address at least one of three broad functional areas, relating to the EDRM, that Gartner chose to reflect the overlapping wants and needs of e-Discovery users, including left and right sides of the EDRM model, and information management. Vendors with end-to-end EDRM processes are also included.

Generally speaking, each qualifying vendor was evaluated for a plethora of offerings. From customer experience to sales and pricing to product service and track record, the results are plotted across quadrants, where the x-axis represent the completeness of the vision, while the y-axis represents an ability to execute. In the end, vendors fit into four personas: Challengers, Leaders, Visionaries and Niche Players.

via Gartner Releases First Magic Quadrant for E-Discovery Industry.

Filed Under: From The News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

11 considerations to control your e-mail environment | ITWeb

April 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

E-mail has become the lifeblood of many business processes, from business communication to tech support and e-commerce. According to Gartner research, e-mail volume in organisations is growing, typically, by more than 30% annually and the average user receives 7MB of data per day via e-mail.

“As a result of this growth, the handling of e-mail has become a critical business, IT and regulatory issue, driving the need for e-mail archiving solutions,” says Mark Edwards, director of product and services at technology solutions and people resources integrator, Intuate Group.

He adds that most organisations looking for an e-mail archiving solution are motivated by four reasons: mailbox/server management; compliance/records retention; electronic discovery/litigation support; and knowledge management/IP protection.

“In addition to these challenges, IT departments want to know how to control costs associated with the e-mail environment, while keeping important data accessible for business, legal and regulatory users,” he says.

With these escalating demands come new considerations for organisations selecting e-mail archiving solutions. Edwards points out that while analysts talk about the break-even point between on-premise and software as a service (SaaS) e-mail archiving solutions, the increasing demands on e-mail archives are fundamentally changing the equation.

He says that break-even calculations were often based on older hosted archiving models, with limited functionality and high pricing based on very expensive storage.

“SaaS e-mail solutions built on the latest grid technology and from the right vendor can satisfy new archiving demands reliably and cost-effectively in ways that an on-premise solution cannot, with pay-as-you-go pricing, robust technology and expertise to help you meet emerging regulatory, legal and other requirements. These solutions must also be considered in the context of overall organisational e-mail needs: the right archiving solution can simplify and strengthen your general e-mail management systems and processes,” explains Edwards.

via 11 considerations to control your e-mail environment | ITWeb.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

SaaS And E-Discovery Dangers — InformationWeek

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Litigation may be the last thing on IT’s mind as it evaluates software-as-a-service options for the enterprise. Unfortunately, litigation and e-discovery–the act of finding, preserving, and analyzing electronic information–are facts of life. If your company gets dragged into a lawsuit and relevant information is stored inside a provider’s cloud, you need to know that information is available on demand.

That’s why IT should add e-discovery criteria to its list of considerations when evaluating SaaS providers, particularly when looking at services such as hosted e-mail and e-mail archiving, PC and file-share backups, and other information sources that create a legal data trail. No company wants to find that a SaaS application it purchased to streamline operations suddenly has become a major hurdle to its e-discovery obligations.

Fortunately, many of the criteria, including storage and performance, that IT already uses to evaluate SaaS providers can be applied to e-discovery. However, there also are e-discovery-specific requirements that must be considered, such as fine-grained control over retention and disposition of data, and the ability to quickly retrieve information from the service provider’s system.

via SaaS And E-Discovery Dangers — InformationWeek.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Adeptol Offers Cloud and Mobile Document Viewing

November 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

For a company that is a relative baby in the document management space, Adeptol (news, site) keeps pushing its boundaries. Over the past two weeks alone it has upgraded its SaaS document viewing as well as adding a new HTML 5-based viewer for mobile platforms.

We use the word baby in relation to Adeptol only in the sense that it was founded in 2008. After that there’s nothing babyish about it and already, as of October, it has reached v4.5 of its viewer, which supports over 300 file formats.

via Adeptol Offers Cloud and Mobile Document Viewing.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Video: Alfresco Document Management Portal for Project Teams and SMBs | LinearCube

October 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Hosted Document Management for SMBs

LinearCube is a relatively new company. Founded in 2008, its focus is bringing document management solutions to the small to mid size organization, such as legal, professional services and accounting. The company has two lines of business: SaaS document management and an Alfresco-SAP Enterprise solution. The SaaS Document Management solution was launched in January of this year.

A hosted document management and collaboration solution, the service is available 24/7 with subscription pricing starting at US$ 99 per month. The nice thing about this hosted solution is that you aren’t tied into any contracts. So if at any time you aren’t satisfied, it shouldn’t be too hard to walk away.

Not that the company thinks that is likely to happen. Here are some of the features of this document management solution:

Office Integration: Integration with Word, Excel, PowerPoint — check-in/check-out directly in Office

Workflows: Includes out of the box workflow for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Time and Expense processes; Customized approval workflows

Document Types: Define custom document types and associated attributes, a document type can include multiple documents

Versioning: Definable version scheme, full versioning with rollback and purge capability

Collaboration: Document tagging, comments, discussions and share via email, subscription notifications

Along with these capabilities, you also have key word and full text search and the ability to upload entire file directories to the DMS via a desktop shared drive.

Full security at the document and folder level is also provided and you can see the complete history of a document’s lifecycle.

via LinearCube Debuts SaaS Document Management Based on Alfresco.

Filed Under: From The News, Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Dissatisfied SharePoint users are the next SaaS customers | Document Management | Hosted Document Management

October 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

In case you missed it, Global360 this week released survey results that showed many SharePoint users are not happy with the service. 78 percent of respondents reported that SharePoint “user experience was inadequate,” and only 17.6 percent chose that SharePoint was “great and adequately met their needs.”

This study got me thinking, if enterprise users – most equipped with vast IT resources – are dissatisfied with SharePoint, what about the midmarket business, where SharePoint is supposed to deliver its strongest value? And is the demand for SaaS document management indicative that we are at the tip of the iceberg in terms of dissatisfaction with current ECM offerings?

Today, vendors hold the balance of power, but the cloud and SaaS solutions are shifting this equation. Cloud-based SaaS applications allow SMBs and midmarket companies to gain access to the applications and functionality that previously was available only to large enterprises with deep pockets. And equally important, these new applications do not requires teams of IT professionals to implement them.

SaaS applications provide immediate improvement to the user experience, including low financial risk, easy implementation, comprehensive support, high security, and immediate access from anywhere. For the midmarket business that’s grown dissatisfied with the SharePoint experience, SaaS has a lot of upside and will help it grow and stay competitive.

via Dissatisfied SharePoint users are the next SaaS customers | Document Management | Hosted Document Management.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

IT shifts to the cloud, anecdote by anecdote – Computerworld

October 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The enterprise roadmap for cloud computing is being drawn by people such as Mark Stone, the CIO of Safety-Kleen Systems, an environmental services company with about 4,200 employees.

Stone has moved as many as 15% of his applications to cloud-based providers, mostly as software-as-a-service (SaaS), for CRM, travel and other services. Within the next three years, he expects this percentage may rise to about 35% of his application portfolio and include his general ledger.

“I can go today to a variety of SaaS providers and put in software that’s every bit as functionally rich as anything I’ve developed on-site,” said Stone, also less the upkeep of an IT infrastructure for it. For customized software core to his business, he is not ruling out migration to a platform-as-a-service provider (PaaS).

Stone may be among the more aggressive enterprise adopters of cloud-based services. But cloud service offerings are increasingly becoming a routine alternative for IT managers. Although the overall public cloud services market is growing rapidly (IDC puts it at $23 billion today, and about $55 billion in 2014), the shift by IT may be best told by decisions IT managers are making.

via IT shifts to the cloud, anecdote by anecdote – Computerworld.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

eDiscovery on SaaS

October 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

With the number of litigation cases rising each day, the IT environment is becoming more demanding for stricter security and compliance regulations. The burgeoning business fraternity is constantly becoming the target of many lawsuits and there is a need to implement easy and flexible ways to gather tangible evidence. Hence technology has provided eDiscovery tools to handle the complex tasks involved in litigations.

One of the most important aspects of electronic discovery is the use of electronic documents such as emails which are valuable legal documents. Due to a surge in email communication it becomes a difficult task to manage the constantly growing numbers. Thus email archiving can be a necessary part of thecorproate information management process that can suppliment eDiscovery during corporate lawsuits.

In the present scenario companies are struggling to keep afloat with shoestring budgets. And with the added

Related Coverage

SaaS Take Aways

Mobile SaaS

The Effect of the Recession on eDiscovery

Eliminating Shelfware With SaaS

headache of lawsuits more are turning towards eDiscovery litigation support to address their challenges. The latest trend is the use of eDiscovery SaaS model which has brought down the costs of many organizations. The SaaS or Software-as-a-Service model is a vendor hosted infrastructure that is highly secured and the customers can run the applications from their own machines. The software gets updated constantly 24×7. Some advantages of SaaS based electronic discovery services are as follows

via eDiscovery on SaaS.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Document Management Roll-up: Hyland Takes SaaS OnBase Worldwide, Office for Mac Goes to RTM

September 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Hyland Takes OnBase International

Hyland (news, site) is keeping true to its promise that it was going to take the SaaS version of its ECM and document management software OnBase everywhere a little over a year ago.

In a statement issued by the Ohio-based company in the last few days, it promises that by 2011 OnBase Online will be available on all five continents with data centers to support this ambition everywhere too.

However, this is not just a shot in the dark, Hyland says. The popularity and growing acceptance of SaaS was proven, the company says, after it opened its data center in the UK in July 2009 with 100 customers being serviced in this one location already.

To meet the growing international demand for OnBase OnLine, Hyland opened a data center in Australia in late August 2010.

And now this. More expansion is planned with the opening of a new data center this month in the Netherlands, while in 2011 the company will add two more locations, one in Asia and the other in South America.

Not much escaping it really and while many enterprises looking at SaaS solutions face giving in and signing up, other document management companies should be taking note.

via Document Management Roll-up: Hyland Takes SaaS OnBase Worldwide, Office for Mac Goes to RTM.

Filed Under: From The News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts