To overcome these challenges many law firms are looking for new and innovative methods for ESI collection. In the past most organizations worked either directly, or via service providers, with tools that would perform the identification, deduplication, culling, and detailed analysis of ESI within one platform. These tools charge a per GB rate that is in the hundreds of dollars. To alleviate some of the pressure to cut costs, litigation support specialists are looking for lower costs tools to perform upfront identification, dedupe and culling of the initial large dataset. By reducing the dataset up front and using the more expensive analysis tools with a smaller volume of relevant data discovery costs will be reduced. This concept is in line with Index Engines focus on performing initial bulk culling to reduce the downstream review and analysis costs. For example, Index Engines identification, deduping, and culling of online ESI can be performed for less than $50/GB. This is far less expensive versus the hundreds of dollars per GB charged by analysis tools. Combining the two solutions, first pass bulk culling, followed by the detailed analysis saves overall costs of ESI collection.

Controlling costs has been a major theme at ILTA for quite a while. Litigation support professionals will continue to find the right tool at the right price to get the job done. Index Engines Unified Discovery Platform, which collects data from backup tapes, forensic images, hard drives and networks has gained in popularity for this reason. Index Engines is focused on providing the most efficient and cost effective solution to collect ESI.

On August 11th, Index Engines announced the receipt of US patent #7756837 and Euro patent # 1 738 260 DE FR GB for the technology behind Index Engines Unified Discovery Platform. The Index Engines patents were awarded for the development of streaming indexing technology. All other indexing solutions require random access to data in order to generate a searchable index. Index Engines has engineered a platform that performs sequential processing of data. This now patented approach enables the indexing of electronic data as it flows to backup, as well as unprecedented, high speed indexing of network data at 1TB/hour.

These patents serve as further validation that Index Engines is leading the information discovery market with an innovative approach to indexing enterprise data. No other indexing platform can claim patented technology as the secret sauce behind fast and efficient information discovery. These patents prove that the technology supporting Index Engines discovery platform is not just another me-too approach.

The concept of two pass culling is gaining popularity. During the first pass, or bulk culling, the data is indexed, deduped and deNISTed and then the content is searched. This pass is performed first to cull the data down to a relevant subset, and is then delivered into the review platform for refined search and presentation to the client. When Index Engines is used for first pass culling the per GB fees are a mere fraction of what popular review platforms charge for culling. Breaking apart the culling process into two phases allows for tremendous cost savings. ESI will still be delivered in the client’s platform of choice, however the first pass of the data can be completed faster and more cost effectively.

What if there was a way to break free of this risk, and choose the backup strategy that meets the organizations needs today, rather than living with the choice from yesterday? Index Engines recently authored an article on this subject for Computer Technology Review entitled Backup Data Migration Made Easy. In this article, Jim McGann outlines how organizations can avoid the risk of switching to a new backup strategy. By leveraging indexing technology that allows the search and access to backup data regardless of format, enterprise IT teams can now get at historical data without having to maintain the legacy backup infrastructure. This access can be used to migrate valuable data into an archive of their choice. Or simply serve to provide access after the organization switches to a new backup strategy. Either way – the choice is there, enabling freedom to choose a backup strategy that matches current needs.

With the direct indexing speed for tape data increasing six-fold, enterprise tape management and remediation projects have become even easier. Index Engines’ platform enables enterprise IT and litigation support teams to deduplicate, deNIST, search and extract tape data at speeds approaching an unprecedented 1 Tb/Hr/Node rate that has been validated for LAN data indexing. Large scale tape discovery enables the practical remediation of historical backup tapes. Index Engines’ complimentary tape assessment program shows how organizations can save millions in annual offsite storage costs and return their investment in Index Engines in less than one year. Read the full press release here.