Hanzo Hold  Revolutionizes Discovery for Google Workspace (G Suite) with New Release

Hanzo gives enterprises incomparable ease-of-use, visibility, and granular control over the collection, preservation, culling, tagging, and exporting of Google Workspace data in a review-ready format for discovery.

 

Hanzo, a company known for its pioneering technology in dynamic web content preservation from enterprise collaboration applications and complex websites, today announced the beta release of Hanzo Hold for Google Workspace (G Suite) with select customers, with general availability in April. Hanzo brings best-in-class discovery insights and delivers a  purpose-built ediscovery and investigation tool that solves key unresolved challenges with existing market solutions.

 

Most organizations have an overwhelming volume of data in Google Workspace. Hanzo Hold makes it easy to manage data discovery and investigations efficiently and cost-effectively with these features.

 

  • Easy-to-use interface controls both Google Workspace and Slack: One interface controlling collaborative tools, data preservation and data collection.
  • Google Vault control:  Easily connect to Google Workspace with a better user experience for Google Vault allowing Legal Ops to issue holds and perform collections through Hanzo Hold.
  • Targeted data collections: Reduce overall collection sizes by precisely defining custodians (users) and their data by using visual tools such as Google Drive Explorer along with date filters. Users can select the exact Drive information they need to collect from any custodian down to the individual file level.
  • Enhanced file metadata: Hanzo provides visibility to extended metadata beyond what is available via Google Vault, thereby providing better search capabilities once a file is collected.
  • Full data indexing and search capabilities: File searching comes to life in Hanzo with full text and metadata available creating more precise search returns. Provides greater search depth than Google Search/Vault alone giving users more accurate and complete search results.
  • View file versions and history: View file history and previous versions to access more file information. Provides more accuracy and better granular control over document versioning and user edit history.
  • File tagging: Organize data and have more control over data within the system and greater accuracy when exporting information.
  • Review ready exports: Exports complete with full metadata, native files, and text virtually eliminate the need to index data inside review platforms such as Relativity saving complexity, time, and money.

“Hanzo Hold for Google Workspace is born from customers requesting easy-to-use solutions for managing discovery for both Google Workspace and Slack collaboration data,” said Senior Product Manager, Dave Ruel. “ Through Hanzo Hold, we’re providing enterprises one interface to control the data preservation and collection of these collaborative platforms and we’re providing customers solutions to simplify the unique challenges of dynamic, complex data sources — saving time, training costs, and the need for multiple systems.”

About Hanzo

Hanzo brings context and a greater understanding of enterprise data to corporate legal and compliance teams by providing in-house control over dynamic and collaborative data sources. This control allows organizations to reduce billions of dollars in risk, litigation, and compliance costs and elevate their corporate legal and regulatory compliance responses. Hanzo’s software empowers defensible preservation, targeted collection, and efficient review of dynamic content from enterprise collaboration applications and complex websites. Hanzo is SOC 2® Type 2 certified, demonstrating its commitment to data security and serves large corporations worldwide.  Learn more at hanzo.co and follow updates on Twitter: @gethanzo or on LinkedIn.

 

/by Sarena Regazzoni

Rapid Product and Service Adoption, Aggressive International Growth Establishes DISCO as Trusted Innovation Partner

Industry-Leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) Speaks to Best-in-Class Products and Services 

AUSTIN — Feb. 2, 2021 — As legal organizations pivoted to manage the complexities of remote work, they turned to legal technology leader DISCO as a trusted partner to navigate cloud adoption and embrace advanced legal technology. The company today announced widespread adoption of enhanced ediscovery data management capabilities, industry-leading Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and a 300% increase in international business — all positioning the company for aggressive growth in 2021 and beyond. 

The Data Management Suite within DISCO Ediscovery, which allows users to ingest, process, and remediate documents in a single platform, has been used by more than two thirds of DISCO’s ediscovery customers to upload and transfer their own data. When legal teams transitioned to working from home, DISCO optimized its solution to deliver unprecedented speed and convenience, even in home office setups: the average data upload is 33 Mbps, or 2.75 terabytes per matter per day — the equivalent of 170 million pages of documents that could fill 67,584 Bankers Boxes.

Today, DISCO is hosting more than 10 billion files, and DISCO’s autoscaling infrastructure using AWS Lambda provisioned 13 billion server calls in the fourth quarter alone. 

DISCO Products and Services Far Exceed Customer Expectations

DISCO uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine customer satisfaction for its products and services. A company’s NPS is generated by asking customers, “How likely is it that you would recommend [company/product/service] to a friend or colleague?”. 

Fifty-four percent of NPS respondents gave DISCO Ediscovery a 10 out of 10, for an overall NPS of 67. DISCO’s professional services organization earned an NPS of 88, with 83% of respondents ranking DISCO a 10 out of 10. By way of comparison, Retently reports that enterprise software companies average an NPS of 44, and SaaS companies come in at 30. According to Customer Guru, DISCO’s NPS is higher than all but three of 100 top brands. For example, the NPS for Apple is 47, Amazon is 25 and Netflix is 13 — all beloved and iconic companies with amazing products.

“DISCO has always focused on building ‘Products Legal Loves.’ Our stellar NPS results, customer growth and expansion, and product and service innovation make it clear that we are achieving this cornerstone goal,” said DISCO CEO Kiwi Camara. “Legal organizations are increasingly turning to DISCO to help them navigate the digital transformation that today’s work environment demands. We remain focused on the development of a multi-product, full-stack solution that empowers the legal function: ‘Technology That Powers Legal.’”

Technology Innovation, Experience With Global Matters Fueled 3x International Expansion

Legal teams around the world are embracing DISCO for ediscovery and edisclosure, case management, and managed review. In 2020, DISCO’s European Union client base doubled and EU revenue tripled, with customers including Clyde & Co, Kennedys and Withersworldwide aggressively expanding their business with DISCO; the company has been hiring extensively to support and accelerate this demand. Global law firms are also increasingly engaging DISCO on international matters, as the company delivers products and services to address the legal needs of organizations across EMEA, Asia-Pacific and South America.

In addition to the speed, ease of use and associated cost savings that come with DISCO products, EU law firms also praise DISCO’s native high-speed uploader, which provides a 14x improvement over traditional file transfer methods and 10% improvement over leading file transfer acceleration technologies. This unique, cutting-edge technology — available exclusively from DISCO at no additional cost — has proven exceptionally beneficial during the pandemic when traditional data collection and transfer methods are not possible.

“Working with DISCO over the past several years, we have found more than an ediscovery provider – DISCO is a true strategic partner that helps us utilize technology to find our key evidence faster so we can better serve our clients,” said Michael Silvain, Ediscovery Manager for Kennedys. “They empower our global teams to work faster, smarter, and to take advantage of advanced solutions and artificial intelligence to ensure even the obstacles of worldwide lockdowns and remote work are overcome. Beyond their exceptional products, DISCO’s professional services team have supported our success across every matter, and that value is extended to our clients to help them win.”  

About DISCO

DISCO is a legal technology company that applies artificial intelligence and cloud computing to legal problems to help lawyers and legal teams improve legal outcomes for their clients. Corporate legal departments, law firms, and government agencies around the world use DISCO for ediscovery, case management, compliance, disputes, and investigations. For more information, visit www.csdisco.com.‍

/by Laura Wooster

Rethinking Information Governance In The Age Of Unstructured Enterprise Data 

In this eBook, we’ll uncover how the concept of information governance has evolved over time, examine the most critical interdisciplinary elements of IG, and develop a flexible, holistic approach for any organization that wants to advance their information governance efforts.

/by Onna

Onna Blog: What is Information Governance and Why Is It So Important?

Every digital interaction between businesses and their customers leaves an auditable trail of data. Sometimes, data is highly sensitive and needs security, privacy, and discovery controls in place. Other times, data has no value and is simply taking up space. Telling the difference between these types of data and knowing where it all lives is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today.

The truth is an overwhelming amount of data is ungoverned making it difficult to know what is of value and what is not. Not only does this mean that sensitive data could be compromised, but also that potentially useful data remains underutilized. Having a robust information governance plan is the solution to these problems. Let’s get into what it is and why it’s important.

What is information governance?

Information governance is defined in a lot of different ways, but at its core, it refers to a strategic framework for managing information at an organizational level. Although we typically refer to information governance in a digital context, it also incorporates physical assets, such as devices and printed documents. This is especially true in the case of more mature organizations, which often have large amounts of information stored locally, in printed or digital form.

There are many regional and international standards for managing information at scale, and the regulatory compliance landscape is evolving every year. However, the core concepts of information governance have largely remained the same. These include security and privacy, integrity and authenticity, information lifecycle management, and business continuity. But information governance is more than just a legal and ethical obligation. Establishing a robust and adaptable framework can help organizations derive greater value out of their information and drive smarter, more informed decision-making.

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Why is information governance important?

Data overload is real, and it’s one of the biggest challenges facing today’s organizations. Our collective digital activities have now generated almost 60 zettabytes of data, a figure that’s expected to reach 149 over the next four years. In small businesses, data typically exists in the dozens of terabytes, while many larger enterprises have already reached the petabyte scale. These amounts are expected to only increase over the years to come.

Today’s organizations have the monumental task ahead of minimizing risk and maximizing value across increasingly vast data sets. While business leaders usually recognize the fact that their data is valuable, the overwhelming majority of their digital assets are underutilized and inadequately governed and protected. This isn’t helped by the fact that the average enterprise now uses 1,295 different cloud services, each one leaving a trail of data across a complex array of networks and systems.

The difference between information management and information governance

You might have heard the terms information management and information governance used interchangeably, but they’re actually two different tiers of scale. Information management is a subset of the broader information governance framework, which incorporates the capture, classification, storage, distribution, and preservation of information assets. It’s largely reactive in that it encompasses responding to information requests, such as data subject access requests (DSARs) under GDPR and CCPA regulations. It also includes the secure disposal of obsolete data as required by internal company policies and regulatory compliance.

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Information governance has a much broader scope, and what it encompasses varies from one organization to the next. For the most part, it refers to a company’s internal policies and processes for optimizing information management in line with business goals. For example, this might mean reducing operational costs, deriving insights from big data, or even deploying machine-learning algorithms for automated management and governance. In other words, IG goes beyond the systematic management of records and information to incorporate a wide-ranging approach to supporting an organization’s objectives, policies, and standards.

Information governance as an evolving discipline and a driver of innovation

Some business leaders think of information governance purely as a legal requirement. But it’s not all about building a legally defensible program for managing sensitive information. IG is a fast-evolving discipline, which has become a critical business routine in today’s data-heavy age. There’s now a constant need to re-assess IG in line with the advancement of enterprise technology. It’s not a strategy that’s implemented once and then left to run its course – it’s a journey rather than a destination. In fact, the same can be said of IG’s overarching discipline, which is digital transformation.

Without an adaptable IG strategy, it’s impossible for an organization to innovate without adding risk. Fast-changing enterprise technology landscapes, paired with a rapidly accelerating datasphere, mean that there are new risks and opportunities alike. These both need to be managed at a massive scale in an age when enterprises have their information assets stored across a multitude of cloud-hosted apps and online storage facilities, employee- and business-owned mobile devices, and in-house desktops and servers. Factor in the rise of the internet of things (IoT), and there’s no denying the massive scope and scale of today’s information governance requirements.

Implementing robust information governance policies and processes gives today’s companies the opportunity to innovate without increasing risk. For example, let’s say you’re rolling out a new employee communication platform that will enhance productivity among remote workers:

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Overcoming the challenges of scale across business roles

Before any organization embarks on an overhaul of their information governance policies and procedures, it’s important to consider the challenges first. These can include:

  • The complexity and diversity of today’s enterprise technology stacks
  • The rapid proliferation of data across all business roles and departments
  • The new and emerging data privacy regulations at local, state, federal, and global levels
  • The need to derive real-time insights from data to maintain competitive advantage

The above responsibilities apply in almost every business role and department. In enterprise environments, matters become exponentially more complex, especially when factoring in the rise of remote teams and multiple branches. Different departments use a wide range of cloud services. For example, marketing teams use on average 120 different services, while HR use around 100, and finance uses 51, according to one recent study. Since each of these services collects and stores information in a unique way, information governance must apply in every area of the organization.

Information Governance no longer belongs exclusively to legal, compliance, and information security teams. It’s everyone’s responsibility. IG professionals need visibility across the full range of information-based services. Business leaders need to maintain complete audit trails of where their data lives and which controls are in place to protect it.

privacy-policy_what-is-information-governance

Since information governance involves every business-critical role, today’s enterprises need a single, secure, and centralized way to access and manage their entire technology stack and all the data that comes with it. It’s about simplifying large and complex technology environments by bringing everything together under a unified management system where it’s possible to apply and enforce their policies. Maintaining a centralized data repository helps enterprises leverage the information available to them in new and intuitive ways.

6 information governance initiatives every business leader should follow

As one of the integral disciplines of digital transformation, information governance strategies have the potential to drive innovation and empower exponential growth. However, like every business transformation program, there are certain rules and standards to abide by and pitfalls to avoid. Here are our top recommendations to help you supercharge information governance in your organization:

1. Identify an executive-level sponsor

Every business transformation program requires support from leadership. If your information governance initiative doesn’t have someone driving it, it will be far less likely to succeed. Larger companies should establish an IG board or committee that maintains strong links throughout the company and engages leaders across the full range of business roles. Recruiting an engaged sponsor who understands the language of business, and not just the language of compliance and IT, will greatly increase the chances of any changes being accepted.

2. Take an org-wide approach

Many organizations view information governance as nothing but an IT project, but it really takes cooperation from the entire organization. Anywhere data lives, and anyone who touches it needs to be on board for your IG strategy to be successful. Communicating what your IG strategy can bring to different business roles and how they can improve them is paramount to getting participation from all sides of the organization. Eventually, you want your strategy to be integrated with wider corporate culture and become central to everything you do, but first, you must demonstrate value and get buy-in.

3. Educate employees on an ongoing basis

The same way you need to get buy-in from you’re organization, you need to ensure people understand and follow IG company policies. To ensure employees comply with legal, security, and privacy obligations, a suitable training and development program is vital. Education should be an ongoing process, not just a one and done presentation or seminar. By keeping education alive through a cadence, you ensure nothing slips through the cracks. To see policies ingrained in employees’ day-to-day lives, it’s also important to demonstrate the true value of your policies. Whether that means increasing efficiency or making more data-driven decisions, strong information governance can change the way everyone works for the better.

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4. Understand your information lifecycle

Information doesn’t have an inherent lifespan, but it does need to have a predefined lifecycle from the moment it’s first collected to the moment it’s archived or securely disposed of. How long information spends in each stage of the lifecycle and why will vary enormously depending on its content, type, and industry. You should always start by addressing legal factors like privacy regulations to inform what your information lifecycle should look like. After you’ve addressed more pressing legal obligations and business priorities, you can move into standard lifecycle processes that affect the organization at large and document how information should be collected, stored, processed, archived, and disposed of.

5. Choose the right tools and solutions

Due to the challenges of scale brought on by the explosion of data and the increasing range of devices and software used, it’s impossible to achieve full oversight using manual means alone. Every organization needs a powerful, automated approach to managing data throughout every stage of its existence. In enterprise environments, processes that require automation include the application of retention policies, archival, and classification. The main goal should be to implement a platform that brings all your apps and data together under a centrally managed system. Ideally, your IG strategy should adapt seamlessly to evolving technology and corporate environments. An IG initiative that can’t scale and adapt to the future will only end up stifling innovation.

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6.  Incorporate data-driven decision-making

Big data refers to data sets that are beyond human capabilities to make sense of. But big data also presents a wealth of opportunity for businesses to derive valuable insights into their internal operations, customers, supply chains, and more. By centralizing otherwise fragmented and underutilized data from your wider technology environment, you can stay ahead of the curve with informed, real-time decision-making. IG plays a crucial role in making data readily available to authorized parties and enabling them to access and use it in ways that add value throughout the organization.

Curious how Onna can unify your information governance processes? Our Knowledge Integration Platform brings your data together to simplify governance, privacy, compliance, and eDiscovery. Find out more here.

/by Onna

Onna Blog: Unified Information Governance: Reconciling Conflicts Between Stakeholders

Information governance is a critical discipline that encompasses many parts of the business. Compliance, security, legal, and IT all have an important stake in managing information; however, when it comes to handling that information, conflict can arise. Priorities may differ when it comes to data retention, archival, and deletion, leading to difficult decision-making. Add in the pressures of data privacy laws, like GDPR and CCPA, and the perils of disunity only intensify.

So what does the decision-making process look like when legal wants to retain data but IT wants to delete it — both with valid reasons? How can organizations avoid spending on outside counsel to weigh-in on internal decisions? If these questions resonate with you, it might be time to take a hard look at what information governance means in your organization. More likely than not, you are taking a siloed approach to information management that has your people working against, rather than with, one another.

Here are six ways to align information stakeholders and proactively avert conflict.

1. Formalize stakeholder relationships

All too often, information stakeholders are thrust into meeting for the first time because of urgent matters, such as litigation or discovery requests. These matters require cross-functional collaboration, and yet crucial relationships may not be defined. To ensure all stakeholders are connected, you may want to start an information governance steering committee comprising key members from security, compliance, privacy, legal, IT, and other lines of business that hold essential company information — like HR or finance. By proactively bringing stakeholders together and formalizing their roles and responsibilities, you can foster clear communication and coordination from the get-go.

2. Understand information’s value from all perspectives

Company information is multifaceted. It lives in different places and serves different purposes, so its lifecycle isn’t clear-cut — nor is its treatment. For example, while personally identifiable information (PII) may need to be held for regulatory compliance reasons, you might want your year-over-year company performance metrics for business strategy purposes. To avoid miscommunication and conflict, your information governance framework needs to address the value of information from all angles. To start, you can ask questions like: What purpose does this data serve? What department(s) are concerned with this data and why? How might this data pose risk, maximize value, or both? The sooner teams address information from a holistic view, rather than a siloed view, the better.

3. Make a plan for potential conflicts with risk front-of-mind

Once you map out the answers to these questions, you can start to spot overlap and conflict in priorities. Although every organization is different, the most common conflict arises around the question of retention — whether to keep or delete. Although you might be legally bound to retain information, you might also be required to delete information for privacy matters. In scenarios like this, it’s crucial that the necessary stakeholders come together to resolve issues, and not just the ones in conflict. Depending on the situation, you may need the input of separate stakeholders, such as IT, to help you understand what technical solutions are possible. Regardless of the nature of your potential conflicts, identifying them early on will help you get ahead of pain, risk, and confusion.

4. Develop an information governance policy

After you outline stakeholder relationships and identify potential conflicts, you’ll want to bake those solutions into your information governance policy. There’s a lot to consider in developing a policy, but a good rule of thumb is to focus on people, process, and technology. You’ll also want to break it into two portions: minimizing risk and maximizing value.

On the minimizing risk front, narrowing down legal, compliance, and privacy obligations first will ensure the most critical protocols are covered. This could include anything from the who/when/how of handling yearly audits to creating a data retention policy. Once that’s done, you can move on to the data maximization portion, which informs how you will protect and utilize your information. This could be anything from handling eDiscovery to data loss prevention measures. Every company’s policy may look different, but the one thing that should remain consistent is alignment from all information stakeholders.

5. Assign roles and responsibilities

Once you develop an information governance policy, you’ll want to make sure every stakeholder understands their roles and responsibilities. This ensures your framework is put into practice effectively. Every organization looks different, but a good way to delegate responsibilities among each department is branching down from the executive level to working groups. Executives, such as the CIO, CSO, General Counsel, and others can operate as key decision-makers, and different departments, such as security, IT, and compliance, can form working groups to encourage better data stewardship over their own information.

6. Unify your information in one place

You can have all the right people and policies in place, but without the right technology, it can still be a challenge to locate your most vital information — which can lead to stakeholder conflict. Especially when it comes to the scattered, proliferating nature of cloud applications, keeping tabs on dynamic data such as messages, threads, and attachments in so many locations can be daunting. More often than not, teams end up heavily relying on IT to expend more time and resources. Implementing a solution that brings all of your siloed data in one private, secure, and searchable place can make it easier for stakeholders to find what they need at a moment’s notice. Not only can this help you avert future conflict, but also reduce risk, maximize value, and enhance compliance.

Organizations have a huge opportunity to leverage key information to help realize their goals — but first, their governance framework must guide key stakeholders towards alignment. By focusing on the factors we’ve discussed, you can start to transform your information governance plan to work for your people, not against them.

/by Onna

DISCO founder and CEO Kiwi Camara on the company’s Q4 2020 $100 million funding: “Legaltech is booming now, and the industry’s real growth has only just begun. Over the next five to 10 years, legaltech will emerge as the next high-growth category of enterprise software. We are delighted to see investors acknowledge DISCO’s position as the category creator and category leader for legaltech. Legal departments and law firms are embracing the power of artificial intelligence to automate away the parts of the practice of law that don’t require human legal judgment, freeing great lawyers to do the work that only they can do.” 

Click for the press release.

/by Laura Wooster

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/by Sean Heck

Lighthouse, a leader in technology-enabled legal services, today announced the launch of Prism, a new in-house technology that uses AI and machine learning to radically improve document review legal processes. Prism deploys big data analytics along with expert insights and unified workflow consulting to deliver scalable, lightning-speed ediscovery and document review, with the proven ability to save thousands of hours in review time and over $1 million in review costs on a single matter.

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/by Molly McManus

Your data is vulnerable. Hackers access home computers. Employees and contractors can cause breaches. The information security risk is real.

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/by Jordan Ellington

Control Work From Home with SecureReview. Here’s a handy chart that helps you understand what you may be missing from your hosted virtual infrastructure.

/by Jordan Ellington