{"id":11066,"date":"2017-09-20T16:03:58","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T23:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=11066"},"modified":"2023-06-11T16:18:31","modified_gmt":"2023-06-11T23:18:31","slug":"office-365-meets-evolving-ediscovery-challenges-in-a-cloud-first-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/office-365-meets-evolving-ediscovery-challenges-in-a-cloud-first-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Office 365 meets evolving eDiscovery challenges in a cloud-first world"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Microsoft Office 365 gives you eDiscovery in the cloud. Quickly and easily find and retain content to satisfy legal and regulatory requests and internal investigations. And there\u2019s no need to move content to an archive\u2014it stays in place, immutable, secure, and accessible to content owners. Use eDiscovery search tools and Advanced eDiscovery analytics tools to filter content, and to cut review time and costs. Using these tools, our legal department at Microsoft saves about $4.5 million per year.<\/p>\n

Executive Summary<\/h2>\n

To continue to meet legal, business, and regulatory compliance challenges, businesses must be able to keep and protect important information and quickly find what\u2019s relevant. Spending days, if not weeks, manually sifting through millions of files to find the small number that are relevant isn\u2019t just expensive, it isn\u2019t an option.<\/p>\n

This paper walks you through the eDiscovery capabilities in Microsoft Office 365 and gives examples of how we use them at Microsoft to help satisfy compliance and legal requests in a timely and cost-effective manner.<\/p>\n

When organizations migrate to the cloud, they are better served by solutions that are designed for the cloud from the beginning. That’s why at Microsoft, we’ve adopted a cloud first strategy. Our solutions give our customers increased efficiencies, cost savings, and security in the cloud, right from the start. Our Office 365 eDiscovery solution brings eDiscovery to the cloud in a scalable, efficient, always up to date, and secure environment.<\/p>\n

Office 365 eDiscovery can help you quickly and cost-effectively locate, identify, and retrieve relevant information\u2014and preserve it in place. No need to move content to a separate archive to store, index, and process. And the Office\u00a0365 eDiscovery solution is available globally to use in any locale or situation where you need to respond to legal and compliance needs or to an internal investigation.<\/p>\n

Complementing the eDiscovery capabilities is Office 365 information governance. It helps preserve the content you need and eliminate what you don\u2019t, minimizing over-preservation and reducing the risk and expense of eDiscovery, investigations, and regulatory compliance.<\/p>\n

When you need to respond to a legal or regulatory information request, the search and analytics tools in Office\u00a0365 eDiscovery can cut your costs and streamline your responses. eDiscovery search finds text and metadata in content across your Office 365 assets\u2014SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business Online, and Exchange Online. Office\u00a0365 Advanced eDiscovery further organizes and filters your content. It groups content into categories, removes duplicates, and uses machine learning to filter for relevance, reducing the amount that must be sent to review. You\u2019ll find relevant content faster\u2014while keeping your organization\u2019s information more secure.<\/p>\n

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At Microsoft, we know how demanding and complex compliance it can be. As you might imagine, being a large enterprise operating at a global scale, we\u2019re subject to many discovery requests every year. Our legal department uses the eDiscovery features of Office 365 to improve the accuracy and usefulness of our discovery results and save time and money.<\/p>\n

Before Office 365 eDiscovery was available, we had to manually collect content from various sources. Gathering a large volume of content and loading it into an offline processing tool took time. Then we had to reprocess it. With collection, processing, and remediation, it could take between two and three weeks to give outside counsel the documents they requested. Today, we do most of this work in hours, not days or weeks. We start to export content on the fly and have it ready for counsel to load into their review tool by the end of the day.<\/p>\n

When we need to find specific content to respond to discovery requests, we first use eDiscovery search in the Office\u00a0365 Security & Compliance Center. We run searches right away, across the relevant Office 365 assets, without requiring the preliminary step of collecting content and moving it to a separate location to index and search.<\/p>\n

We also preserve relevant content in place, in Office 365. We associate the relevant content sources with a case that we create in the Security & Compliance Center and then place the content on hold. This hold overrides any other retention policies that might be in force, and preserves the content for the duration of the case. The hold is practically invisible to the people using the sources, so they can continue working on their projects without interruption or loss of productivity.<\/p>\n

After we discover potentially relevant content using Office 365 eDiscovery Search, we use Advanced eDiscovery analytics to thread email conversations, remove duplicates, find near-duplicates, and identify themes. This lets us give each reviewer a structured batch of unique files, eliminating redundant effort and saving review time. In some cases, instead of doing heavy keyword culling, we use the Advanced eDiscovery Relevance feature to identify relevant content. And even if we\u2019re using keyword filtering, we always use Advanced eDiscovery to export our content in a format that\u2019s immediately usable by our eDiscovery review partner and which requires no reprocessing.<\/p>\n

By reducing the amount of manual work required to respond to eDiscovery requests, Office 365 eDiscovery saves our legal department about $4.5 million annually. With eDiscovery search, we typically reduce the amount of content in a case by about 95 percent. However, this still leaves large volumes of data that need to be submitted to the very costly process of legal review. Advanced eDiscovery helps us reduce these costs significantly: we typically see a further reduction of 30 percent by eliminating duplicate files and grouping near-duplicates, and another 25 percent by consolidating email threads.<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n

It can happen in any organization. You\u2019re going about your business, and you receive a discovery request for \u201cany and all\u201d information (email, documents, presentations, databases, instant messages, images, voice mail, social media posts, and so on) related to a project you completed last year. Or you need to collect content that demonstrates you\u2019re complying with corporate or government rules. If only the tools required to manage those tasks were just built into the platform where the data is. Fortunately, when your data is in Office 365, they are.<\/p>\n

To be prepared for internal investigations, external litigation, or regulatory requests, your organization needs to preserve potentially relevant content. At the same time, you want to find relevant content quickly without disrupting your business. Preserving content you don\u2019t need impedes your ability to do this and increases your overall risk.<\/p>\n

We have seen that as businesses grow, so too do the demands to be compliant. The Office 365 Security & Compliance Center provides the solution. Its compliance features help you protect important content and reduce the expense and risk of keeping content you don\u2019t need. And its eDiscovery features make it easier to identify content that\u2019s relevant to a specific investigation, preserve it, and get it ready for a requesting party or reviewer.<\/p>\n

Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, the complexities of compliance are simplified with Office\u00a0365. Small businesses can grow quickly and achieve compliance with a single step. Large enterprises will find complex compliance requirements simplified and advanced capabilities just a click away.<\/p>\n

Key benefits of Office 365 eDiscovery<\/h3>\n

As organizations migrate to the cloud, they need solutions designed for the cloud from the start, not simply older tools that have been shoe-horned into this new environment. That’s why our cloud first strategy requires that we build new solutions that give our customers increased efficiencies, cost savings, and security in the cloud. eDiscovery has traditionally been on premises where information is manually collected from various sources and processed to find the most relevant data. Our Office 365 eDiscovery solution brings eDiscovery to the cloud in a scalable, efficient, up to date, and secure environment.<\/p>\n

Office 365 eDiscovery offers many benefits, including:<\/p>\n