E-Discovery Moves to the Cloud

http://ow.ly/6kBv8

Article by Ben Kerschberg on Forbes.com

This article discusses the trend toward moving eDiscovery to cloud based computing models.  The article describes cloud based computing models, and advantages that eDiscovery providers offer by relying upon such models, as follows:

"The cloud model has a three-tiered architecture based on (i) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), (ii) platform as a service (PaaS); and (iii) software-as-a-service (SaaS). Cloud-based services may be used on demand, anywhere in the world (“location independent”) and independent of any specific hardware behind a corporation or law firm’s firewall. Cloud-based e-discovery vendors offer numerous benefits for the corporations and law firms that partner with them. These include:

The ability to scale or decrease one’s service level at almost no marginal cost beyond that of the on-demand services;

Not having to purchase upgrades;

Drastic reductions in on-premise capital expenditures. IDC predicts that cloud computing will reduce the cost of owning IT infrastructure by 54 percent. The importance of such a decrease is highlighted by the statistics presented below.
Usage-based pricing with no fixed contracts or contracts with renewable terms as short as 30 days."

The article also points out the results of an Information Week sponsored study of 374 business technology professionals about the biggest challenges of trying to perform eDiscovery services in-house, as follows:

• Cost of IT staff resources that must be supported – 57%


• Cost of upgrading software – 57%


• Cost of maintaining infrastructure – 55%


• The inability to take advantage of functionalities then-available on the newest version – 34%


• The lack of flexibility to support changing business needs – 32%


• Dated user interfaces – 27%


• Limited number of vendors to choose from – 22%