E-Discovery in Cloud: Security Issue and Compliance Gaps
E-discovery serves as a reliable method for organizations in accumulating, preserving and organizing data for legal and regulatory compliance. However, advancements in technologies such as containers have invoked security and compliance gap into the prolonged reliability of e-discovery platforms during cloud migrations.
E-discovery embraces the organizational processes, with the help of which a company or its legal counsel could search, recover and preserve digital information as significant evidence.
Continuous improvement and innovation have made e-discovery industry costly, with many companies investing millions for in-house solutions, enabling them to implement e-discovery effectively and minimize their legal fees. A number of these businesses and their e-discovery vendors are expanding their corporate e-discovery platforms for more efficient business processes, decreased costs and enhanced ROI on those platforms.
Unfortunately, the companies which opt containerized data storage—along with their e-discovery platforms—need to prove the continuity and stability of data integrity and security across databases and programs. The present data governance programs are struggling to maintain compliance and security. Also, they are expected to further adjust and transform during a cloud migration.
Cloud Computing, Containers and Orchestrate
Containers could be as small as 10MB in size, which greatly minimizes the hardware and software resources needed to drive applications and data services while being utilized as a migration source toward cloud computing. Intricate applications are distributed between containers and shared across third-party cloud servers, residing in a corporate firewall or an internet-connected device.
The software can automatically sequence the containers into an integrated pattern when there is a need for an integrated operation for a defined process. On the completion of the designated process, software disassembles the containers.
Such orchestration is highly profitable for an organization, as it provides immediate availability of the company’s software, hardware and data resources when they are required for certain processes. Containers along with the orchestration have improvised the working capability of virtual machines (VMs) through enabling multiple applications without requiring multiple copies of the core OS.
Containers highly increase the efficiency of the orchestration process through distributing and storing huge databases, which simplifies the selection of specific data sets and the occasional use of that data. The storage containers could be shared, organized and orchestrated from any device or networked location.
E-Discovery in Cloud Initiating New Compliance and Security Issues
Companies are always striving to discover, re-create and test the authenticity of stories, which is possible through constant exploration across their stored digital information. With the e-discovery platform, every data byte is stored, whether it’s highly sensitive or an ordinary piece of information.
Organizations are utilizing e-discovery platforms for corporate and legal battlegrounds. From the early ’90s, many nations and U.S. courts have accepted the importance of electronic information and declared it an essential source of evidence. For instance, companies must have proof of their truth and they must recover it. In the boardroom, during internal investigations, when negotiating with unions and work councils, when licensing applications and when performing information security breach forensics, companies must execute e-discovery to accumulate and organize relevant data.
As integral and important as e-discovery platforms are, however, there are security and compliance issues that must be met with regards to the cloud and data containerization. Keep in mind:
- Containers could serve as new attack vectors. When using e-discovery in lawsuits, containers initiate the burden to prove the recovered data has not been corrupted or exploited by hacking or any other illegitimate internal manipulation.
- Databases that were integrated and secured previously are now divided and dispersed. However, it is important that the design documentation and execution logs are showing that the data has sustained integrity and authenticity.
- Present-day data governance programs require further adaption. But unlike the requirement, data governance programs are struggling to become aligned with the older enhancements such as mobile devices and third-party digital storage. Initiation of new indexing schemes, information directories and storage practices are necessary across the containerized data sets.
— Zehra Ali