In the United States, the lack of any single, overarching cloud compliance law complicates the matter. Businesses must stay on top of a patchwork of federal and state laws, applicable international laws, and industry-specific regulations. This guide will help streamline the process.

Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model

Business leaders must remember that cloud compliance involves a shared responsibility between the cloud service provider and the customer. Under this shared responsibility model, cloud providers take responsibility for securing the underlying infrastructure, while the customer secures the data and workloads that live in the cloud.

For example, Microsoft secures its data centers and implements robust security around the hardware and networking equipment that supports Microsoft 365 services. It employs some encryption, provides continuous monitoring of the platform, and releases security patches for its applications.

Microsoft customers, on the other hand, must configure the Microsoft 365 security options properly and apply patches promptly. Additionally, they need to take steps to track and protect sensitive data. They must also secure user accounts and control data access. And they need to identify and protect endpoints that include every device that connects to the network.

Major Regulations to Consider

Organizations may need to comply with any number of privacy regulations, depending on their location and industry. But several key regulations apply widely and/or set the tone for other regulations. Understanding these landmark regulations will help organizations build an overall compliance strategy.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), while a European law, still applies to many US businesses, and it serves as a model for many emerging regulations here in the States.

Key requirements of GDPR include the requirement to gain clear consent before processing personal data. Individuals also have the right to access their personal data or request a transfer of that data. And businesses must notify individuals promptly if a breach occurs.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) sets the standard for protection of protected health information (PHI). It requires entities to implement stringent safeguards to protect PHI, including limiting PHI access to authorized personnel. It also requires organizations to encrypt PHI data, conduct regular risk assessments, and train employees.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates strict controls relating to financial data and applies to all public companies in the US. It includes stringent requirements around retention and destruction of financial records. It also requires companies to strengthen IT controls around financial systems and data. And it mandates audit trails and regular risk monitoring.

Several states model their privacy laws on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It grants consumers the right to access and correct their data that businesses collect. It also guarantees individuals the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal data, as well as to request deletion of their data. And businesses must take reasonable security measures.

Key Steps to Building a Compliant Cloud Environment

While each regulation has specific requirements, common themes run across regulations. Prioritizing those common elements will help businesses stay ahead of the compliance game.

• Data governance – Develop a comprehensive data governance framework that includes classifying and monitoring sensitive data, tightening access controls around that data, and implementing clear policies around data retention and data sharing.
• Vendor management – Review vendor contracts to ensure necessary language regarding data privacy and security. Additionally, carefully control vendor access and perform regular supply chain audits and monitoring.

• Incident response – Create, implement, and regularly update a plan for responding to data breaches, including mandated notifications.
• Continuous monitoring – Regularly monitor compliance status and make necessary adjustments. Automated compliance monitoring streamlines this process.
• Ensure consumer control over personal data – Display privacy policies clearly on public-facing apps and websites. Include easy-to-use forms for consumers to specify their preferences regarding sharing of personal information, targeted advertising, and cookies.
• Ensure reasonable security measures – In addition to measures already mentioned, implement encryption, strong authentication methods, role-based access controls, and comprehensive network security. Deliver regular employee training around security and compliance.

Additional Tips Round Out the Ultimate Guide to Cloud Compliance

Compliance concerns require substantial time, resources, and energy. However, by wisely leveraging compliance technology such as the compliance solutions from eGovernance.com, businesses can reduce much of the pain involved in regulatory compliance.

eGovernance Compliance allows you to tackle all data compliance monitoring mandates simultaneously, including HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, SOX, PCI-DSS, and more. It gives wide visibility by connecting to all data storage locations through a single console. It also simplifies data classification, aids access control, and provides automated alerts to possible problems.

Take a proactive approach to regulatory compliance by contacting the compliance experts at eMazzanti Technologies.

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However, implementing effective information governance requires careful planning and coordination. And it takes time. Organizations should start with a comprehensive data audit to inform next steps. Leveraging information governance consulting services will streamline the process.

Assess Your Current State and Future Data Goals

To begin with, the organization must learn what data it has and where it lives. An initial data audit will develop a picture of data across the enterprise. The audit includes components such as:

• Data mapping – The organization must identify where data lives and how it is stored. This will include understanding information infrastructure elements such as document libraries. It will encompass all storage locations, whether on premises or in the cloud. And it will involve identifying sensitive data.
• Determining data quality – Duplicates, outdated information, and data silos all affect the quality of data. Likewise, access issues affect the usefulness of data. If the right people cannot find and access the information they need quickly and securely, the data holds little value.
• Assessing data processes and policies – Determine what information policies exist and whether they are enforced. These include policies for accessing and sharing data as well as policies for retaining and destroying information.
• Evaluating information security – A cyber security assessment reviews the policies and security controls governing information storage, movement, and access. And it evaluates existing security measures against regulatory requirements, industry standards and business needs.

With an understanding of the current state of information, the organization can define its vision and goals for information governance, aligning those goals with business needs.

Locate and Classify Data

Data classification proves foundational to good information governance. Sensitive and important data may be hidden in documents, meeting minutes, emails, chats and more. Labeling sensitive data allows data stewards to track that data and apply essential protections such as encryption and sharing restrictions.

Manually locating and tagging data proves difficult if not impossible at scale. But AI-powered tools automate the process of finding and classifying data wherever it lives. Properly classified data simplifies regulatory compliance and eases the eDiscovery process.

Define and Implement Data Lifecycle Policies

Data classification plays a key role in enforcing data retention and destruction policies. Regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA include strict rules around the minimum amount of time to retain certain types of information. On the other hand, information retained too long can become a liability.

Automating retention policies according to data type gives the organization a defensible way to maintain regulatory compliance. Because regulations and business priorities evolve over time, data stewards should regularly review and update retention policies.

Ensure Compliance Management

To address mandates from a wide variety of regulations, an effective information governance strategy should include regular compliance monitoring. eGovernance monitoring tools deliver visibility into sensitive data from a single console. Content alerts and reports allow for proactive remediation. And monitoring provides proof of policy demanded by many regulations.

Build Comprehensive Data Security

Data security works hand in hand with compliance monitoring as an essential element of information governance. While regulatory compliance mandates reasonable security precautions, organizations must move beyond checkbox compliance to protect against data breaches.

A risk assessment will highlight vulnerabilities and provide a basis for security planning. Security strategies must include ensuring proper access management. Endpoint protection, encryption, data backups, and multifactor authentication prove critical, as well. And organizations must address supply chain security and provide regular security awareness training for all staff.

Adapt Information Governance Strategy to Business Needs

Company structure, business priorities and specific industry requirements all play a role in information governance. Consequently, the optimal strategy will look different from one company to another. In every organization, however, effective information governance requires engagement of stakeholders and users throughout the organization.

eGovernance delivers a cloud-based information governance solution. Our consultants will work with your organization to design and implement an information governance strategy customized to your specific business needs.

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eGovernance Cloud Solutions

eGovernance is a Cloud based solution for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data.

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When choosing an archiving solution, businesses have various options. The right solution will depend on business needs. For instance, consider whether the organization will need to archive email messages from multiple platforms. Additionally, consider regulatory requirements, as well as how much granular control the organization will need.

Two popular email archiving solutions include the Microsoft 365 Business Standard email archive and eGovernance archive. Each solution offers significant benefits for small businesses. Organizations should carefully evaluate their needs and budgets as they select the archiving solution most suited to their purposes.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard Email Archiving

Microsoft 365 Business Standard offers email archiving as part of its cloud-based productivity suite. This option is scalable, easy to set up and use. And it offers important email security and compliance features. With Microsoft email archiving, business users can:

• Access archived email messages from Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop app or Outlook mobile app.
• Search archived email messages using keywords, filters, and advanced query syntax.
• Apply retention policies to archived email messages to automatically delete or preserve them based on predefined criteria.
• Place archived email messages on hold to prevent deletion or modification for legal or investigative purposes.
• Export their archived email messages to a PST file or an Azure storage location for backup or migration purposes.

However, Microsoft email archiving does have several limitations that small businesses need to consider. For example, it does not support third-party email platforms or applications, such as Gmail or Thunderbird. And it does not provide granular control over archiving policies, such as excluding certain folders or attachments from archiving.

Additionally, certain archiving features remain tied to Microsoft licensing levels. Consequently, organizations may not benefit from uniform coverage throughout the organization. Since companies often choose to adjust licensing based on job functions, this can leave part of the workforce without adequate archiving features.

eGovernance Email Archiving

Like the Microsoft solution, eGovernance email archiving offers immediate scalability and 24×7 access to archived email messages. Powerful search capabilities aid users and eDiscovery efforts, and organizations can apply retention policies and automated holds. Also, important security controls keep the archives secure and compliant.

In addition, the eGovernance solution provides critical features not available through Microsoft. For instance, eGovernance:

• Supports multiple email platforms and applications, from Microsoft 365 to Gmail, Thunderbird and more.
• Provides granular control over archiving policies, such as excluding certain folders or attachments from archiving. Organizations can also apply retention rules based on keywords or metadata.
• Offers advanced features such as deduplication, compression, analytics, auditing, and reporting.
• Provides uniform coverage regardless of Microsoft licensing level. This means that discovery services and policy-based retention remain consistent across all enterprise and business licensing levels.

eGovernance does require some technical expertise to implement. Businesses will achieve optimal results when partnering with eGovernance consultants. However, users will find the system easy to use. Even beginners can perform sophisticated searches of their archives without memorizing Boolean syntax and statements.

How to Archive Email Records for Small Business with Expert Help

As organizations decide how to archive email records for small business, they should look carefully at their email environment and business needs. They should also review retention needs and regulatory requirements.

Whether organizations choose Microsoft or eGovernance for email archiving, the archiving consultants at eMazzanti and Messaging Architects can help. As Microsoft partners, and with deep expertise in eGovernance, they will ensure that organizations optimize the archiving process to support business goals.

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Consider the vast amount of sensitive data held by county governments. Without appropriate information governance, sensitive information related to local citizens and businesses could be vulnerable to breach. And when mismanaged data makes it difficult to fulfill public records requests, governments incur penalties and lose face with the public.

On the other hand, when that same county government manages, secures, and uses data effectively, they achieve critical goals of accountability, transparency and efficiency. Decision makers have reliable access to quality data, and public trust in the governing process increases. These same benefits apply to organizations in all industries.

What is eGovernance?

eGovernance refers to electronic governance, specifically governance of electronic information. As in the county government example above, common goals of eGovernance include improving data access, strengthening data security, driving efficiency and productivity and promoting accountability.

That is, organizations need to know what data they have, where it lives, who owns it and who can access it. They need to ensure that they data they own is high quality and secure from breach. And they need to achieve compliance with legislation and other regulations that govern data.

Information Governance Challenges

Today’s data environment poses significant challenges for information governance. In the first place, organizations collect massive amounts of data every day from many disparate sources. These include Teams documents, customer input from company websites, emails, meeting recordings, chat messages, data from IoT devices and much more.

Because information lives in so many different places, including BYOD devices and remote locations, identifying and securing that data proves challenging. At the same time, the regulatory environment grows more complex every year.

Technology trends such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence offer exciting capabilities. But they also complicate the cyber security environment and introduce new privacy and ethics concerns.

Finally, decision makers and data analytics tools need clean, trustworthy data. This requires comprehensive checks for duplicates, errors, and outdated information. It also requires a balance between facilitating data access and ensuring data protection and privacy.

eGovernance Solution Companies Best Practices Deliver Key Benefits

By following best practices for information governance, organizations do more than ease the path to regulatory compliance. They also reduce risk, ensure appropriate access to high quality data, and improve business planning.

An effective information governance program steps beyond checkbox compliance. For instance, in addition to ensuring the implementation of appropriate data security controls, proactive organizations will conduct penetration testing.

In addition, automating repetitive or redundant tasks such as tagging data and processing permission requests helps to reduce error. In fact, automation proves essential to managing an increasingly complex data environment.

As organizations migrate some or all their data to the cloud, they will need to adjust the tools they use to manage their data. Look for tools designed specifically to find and manage data across multiple clouds and on-premises environments.

Partner with eGovernance Solution Companies to Achieve Business Goals

An eGovernance solution company will help you choose and implement information governance solutions tailored to your business needs. The consultants at eMazzanti Technologies and Messaging Architects deliver a fully managed, cloud-based solution for preserving, discovering, and accessing digital data across your data environments.

Our data experts will begin by assisting you to build a comprehensive data and records management plan to reduce unstructured data and risk. A state-of-the-art archiving solution facilitates policy-based retention and destruction of data, regardless of Microsoft license type. Add our powerful eDiscovery tool and digital compliance solutions to gain the transparency, accountability, and efficiency your organization needs.

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eGovernance Cloud Solutions

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No matter how skilled, humans alone cannot effectively track, manage, and analyze massive stores of data to achieve compliance. Fortunately, continually evolving compliance technology fills the gap.

These intelligent compliance technologies deliver key benefits by automating processes, helping companies stay updated with regulatory changes and providing continuous monitoring. Powerful risk assessment tools can also identify and prioritize potential risks early, proactively applying necessary remediation measures.

Compliance Challenges Can Prove Costly

Organizations in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, need to know where sensitive data lives and who has access to it. However, finding that data can prove difficult when it is stored across multiple platforms and storage locations. For instance, most organizations use a mix of on-premises and cloud environments, with potentially thousands of connected devices.

To successfully monitor sensitive information in this complex environment, data stewards need to classify the data. With huge amounts of data being created each day, manually locating and tagging sensitive data presents an insurmountable challenge. Organizations need a way to simplify the process and reduce the chance for human error.

Despite the challenges involved, non-compliance can result in significant consequences, including stiff fines and lost customers. Thus, compliance teams must have early notification of potential compliance issues. They also require the ability to clearly demonstrate compliance in case of an audit.

Automate Processes with AI

Because artificial intelligence (AI) can rapidly process massive amounts of data, it has become a critical component of compliance technology. AI tools save time, reduce errors, and enable early response by automating routine processes and analyzing data to highlight trends.

For instance, automating processes such as data classification and managing retention policies frees up resources and limits errors. Using pattern matching technology, AI tools can automatically recognize and tag sensitive data such as credit card information. Machine learning even allows tools to learn to identify certain types of information based on provided examples.

AI can also take the guesswork out of incorporating regulatory changes by helping organizations discover and interpret new regulations and updates. And AI tools can suggest necessary changes to policies and workflows.

Streamline Audits and Remediation

Compliance technology and AI play a key role in risk management. By automating compliance and security monitoring and analyzing patterns, advanced tools identify risks early. They then automatically send customized alerts to the right people.

For example, intelligent compliance tools deliver critical visibility into data across platforms. Once the system identifies sensitive data in unacceptable locations, it can easily remove or quarantine the information. Customizable reports demonstrate compliance and ensure that auditors and compliance officers receive the information they need daily.

eGovernance Delivers the Benefits of Compliance Technology

Tools like eGovernance provide organizations with the ability to view and manage sensitive data either manually or automatically from a single web portal. This includes streamlined data classification, automatic reports, and the ability to easily review and adjust access rights.

In addition, organizations can conduct internal investigations using powerful search capabilities. Because they can search all sources simultaneously, these digital compliance solutions allow auditors to drill down into specific compliance issues with no outsourcing.

Contact the information governance experts at eGovernance to achieve lower costs and reduced risk. They’ll help your compliance team simplify the process of achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance.

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eGovernance Cloud Solutions

eGovernance is a Cloud based solution for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data.

Archiving »

eDiscovery »

Compliance »

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1. Increasingly Complex eDiscovery Architectures

The rapid shift to remote and hybrid work drastically changed the way we collaborate and create data. For instance, in a period of months, collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom recorded growth rates of as much as 3000 percent. Now, in addition to email, colleagues conduct work over a variety of messaging apps, video conferencing and other cloud services.

At the same time, workers use numerous devices every day to conduct business, from company laptops to personal smartphones. And they use multiple applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint or Dropbox, to store and share data.

These various collaboration tools deliver massive amounts of discoverable data in a wide variety of unique formats. And this creates a need for improved technology solutions. For example, video files eat up storage space and can prove difficult and time-consuming to search. And BYOD policies complicate the process of discovery critical data across devices and platforms.

2. AI Streamlines the eDiscovery Process

Fortunately, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) can help legal teams quickly find and process relevant data. Using AI, they can analyze the body of data to develop a picture of what data exists, where it lives and how much of it may prove relevant to the case at hand.

For instance, AI can suggest related documents that more manual processes might miss. Additionally, AI-powered analytics can deliver deep insights that prioritize information and inform case strategy.

3. Automated Technology Improves Workflows and Early Case Assessment

Automating many of the routine and time-consuming tasks associated with eDiscovery frees up legal teams to focus on delivering legal advice. At the same time, automation reduces the chance for human error and leaves an audit trail. For instance, introducing automation to legal holds simplifies the process while making it scalable, secure, and legally defensible.

Automation also improves early case assessment (ECA) by helping the team quickly identify and prioritize relevant data, streamline the review process and support more accurate cost predictions. By accelerating ECA in the eDiscovery process, organizations reduce time and cost associated with gathering, preserving, and reviewing data.

Automation can improve many of the processes associated with eDiscovery. For example, organizations may find that legal holds and data collection provide a good place to start. But they should take time to develop separate workflow templates for common scenarios to avoid re-inventing the wheel with each new case.

4. Information Governance Proves Essential

While technology solutions such as automation and AI streamline eDiscovery, those solutions prove most effective when combined with information governance. In fact, information governance provides a critical foundation for eDiscovery.

In a nutshell, information governance involves knowing where the organization’s data lives and who owns it. This includes categorizing and mapping data throughout the organization, determining access controls and information lifecycles and ensuring data security. Technology powers all these processes.

With data properly classified and mapped, a process enhanced by automation, teams can use in-place searches to quickly find and analyze relevant data before gathering it. In addition, good retention/destruction policies help ensure clean data and reduce redundancies, making eDiscovery easier.

5. Cloud-Based Technology Drives Efficiency and Lowers Cost

Most organizations, including law firms, store some or all their workloads and data in the cloud. Consequently, relying on legacy, on-premises eDiscovery solutions will no longer prove a viable option moving forward. Cloud-based technologies make it easier to find and collect relevant data while reducing discovery overhead and improving speed and efficiency. They can include legacy on-premises data as well as data from multiple cloud solution vendors.

Proactively Address eDiscovery Trends with Legal Technology

By leveraging current and emerging legal technology, organizations can overcome eDiscovery trends and challenges such as multiple data formats and the need to locate and process massive amount of data quickly. Cloud-based information governance and eDiscovery solutions from eGovernance.com help companies gain control of their data and reduce eDiscovery pain.

eGovernance solutions work across multiple platforms, centralizing eDiscovery while allowing you to keep your data in place. Additionally, teams can extract copies as needed to meet retention requirements. Streamlining eDiscovery with eGovernance.com solutions reduces the time and cost involved while improving security and ensuring a legally defensible process.

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Address the Risks of Unstructured Data

The bulk of the information generated by the average organization consists of unstructured data. Unlike structured data, which lives in tables or databases, unstructured data comes in a wide variety for formats.

For instance, it includes documents stored in file repositories such as SharePoint or OneDrive. It also includes emails, instant messages, videos and more. And because this unstructured data can live on multiple devices and in the cloud, it presents a significant challenge to security and regulatory compliance.

Consider healthcare organizations that must maintain strict adherence to HIPAA. Patients may email their care providers. Additionally, providers dictate notes from patient encounters, and doctors communicate in various methods as they collaborate to provide care. Strict regulations govern how that data is stored, transferred, and shared.

Reduce Risk of Privacy Law Violations

Data compliance monitoring helps organizations address potential privacy law violations early, reducing or eliminating legal issues. With the right tools, companies gain visibility into all data storage locations, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Using both automated and manual data classification, organizations tag sensitive data such as financial data or protected health information (PHI). They then set customized alerts so that compliance personnel receive immediate email notification of possible compliance issues. Companies can also automate certain remediation actions.

For instance, in the healthcare organization mentioned above, the system can be set to automatically tag PHI as sensitive data. If a user attempts to share PHI outside the organization, the system can be set to block the action and immediately alert compliance personnel.

Demonstrate Regulatory Compliance

Privacy regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR dominate our data environment. Organizations must be able to demonstrate to auditors that they take all the proper steps to ensure that no unauthorized persons can access sensitive information. Additionally, customers demand assurance that companies treat their personal and financial information carefully.

Many regulatory agencies mandate monitoring as part of the criteria for achieving compliance. Monitoring demonstrates that the organization has implemented proper procedures and regularly enforces them. Additionally, if an issue does slip through, monitoring can help in reducing the negative repercussions.

Identify Security Vulnerabilities

In addition to achieving and demonstrating compliance, monitoring provides essential visibility into how data moves within and outside the organization. This allows security personnel and data stewards to pinpoint vulnerabilities and adjust information governance strategies accordingly.

Harness the Power of Automated Data Compliance Monitoring

Organizations manage huge caches of data in numerous formats on hundreds of devices. Such a complex data environment makes manual monitoring all but impossible. Fortunately, advancements in automated monitoring technology can help.

Not only can automation process large amounts of data rapidly, but with AI and machine learning the systems learn to identify risks and alert the right people. In many cases, the monitoring systems can automatically initiate necessary remediation, such as blocking a user from sharing sensitive data.

Automation also helps companies stay on top of the regulatory landscape. Laws and industry regulations continue to evolve, and it can prove challenging for organizations to keep abreast of all the applicable standards. Automated monitoring systems can scan for regulatory changes.

Partner with Data Compliance Monitoring Technology Experts

eGovernance solutions provide organizations with the tools they need to monitor data for compliance with regulations and with internal policies. Compliance personnel can track sensitive data and initiate steps to reduce or eliminate potential threats.

Along with compliance monitoring, customers gain access to consultants with deep expertise in information governance, archiving and eDiscovery.

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Now, picture an organization that has implemented an optimized eDiscovery process with cloud-based eDiscovery tools. Rather than working long hours to search for data when litigation appears, they run various complex searches and compare results in seconds. Thus, they respond to eDiscovery requests quickly while reducing data collection and review costs.

eDiscovery Challenges

eDiscovery requests appear straightforward at first: Deliver all the information relevant to the pending case. But the subtleties of modern communication and information storage complicate the process in a variety of ways.

For example, organizations with a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy face a formidable data gathering challenge. Employees often combine personal and business use on laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In addition, they may use a variety of third-party applications to do their work and probably have not retained some critical information.

As devices and data storage locations multiply, increasing volumes of data must be searched and reviewed, ballooning eDiscovery costs.

Once a pending or lawsuit or preservation letter is received, one of the key steps is the deposition of the target company. At this point, the legal team is interested in determining what information is available from the organization.

Overcome eDiscovery Challenges with Consistent, Secure, and Quick eDiscovery Tools

Instead of reacting in a frenzy to requests for eDiscovery, modern organizations practice solid information governance, and employ effective eDiscovery tools that are consistent, secure, and quick:

• Consistent – Organizations need to produce consistent results when performing eDiscovery searches and have confidence in both the results they obtain as well as stating that confidence to the people requesting that data.
• Secure – Guaranteeing the integrity of the data is vital. Some eDiscovery systems are built into the data management systems or applications. These could be compromised “accidentally” or “willfully” by individuals tasked with maintaining system.
• Quick – The time to discover, search and produce information often requires multiple individuals with the associated costs in time and effort. Solutions should be quick, and efficient and reduce overall effort spent performing discoveries.

The Modern, Cloud-Based eDiscovery Approach

Consistent, secure, and quick eDiscovery tools empower legal teams to sift through all their data in minutes. These modern cloud-based solutions enable personnel to review and analyze data in place, then collect only relevant electronically stored information (ESI). Thus, they are enabled to:

• Perform all eDiscovery efforts in-house and decide sooner to litigate vs. settle to save money and resources.
• Identify and review relevant data before collection and confidently reduce the amount of data to collect, hold, and review.
• Process discovery requests quickly and reduces the risks of sanctions while maintaining a continuous chain of custody.

Modern eDiscovery tools expand eDiscovery from just email by adding data sources to index and search. They provide quick access to electronic information from various sources such as Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, Citrix ShareFile, Box, Slack, Egnyte, and others.

The modern, cloud-based approach allows centralization of eDiscovery and the ability to keep critical data where it currently resides. Your data stays safe and protected there or you may want to extract copies to meet more strict retention requirements.

Quick eDiscovery Tools Reduce Costs

Modern, high-speed eDiscovery tools position organizations to:

• Reduce Costs – The bulk of eDiscovery costs arise from the collection and initial review of data to discover information pertinent to the discovery request. Streamlining this process saves time and dollars by limiting items produced for final review.
• Simplify the Process – Organizations today are spending more time with discovery. They need to simplify the process instead of complicating it with multiple tools, data formats and complex search tools and syntaxes.
• Shorten the Learning Curve – Discovery teams get up to speed quickly and easily using a familiar and easy-to-navigate web-based interface. Searching is simple with easy-to-understand search terms and intelligent syntax.
• Respond Quickly to eDiscovery Requests – No more scrambling. Teams locate and produce the needed information quickly, without interrupting regular business operations.
• Practice Early Case Assessment (ECA) – With a clear picture of the relevant data, business leaders and their counsel make informed strategic decisions early on.

For large or small organizations, these solutions should be able to scale to any number of users and any amount of data. Expect them to provide support for multiple auditors and allow for graduated access levels of security.

The Right Tools from eDiscovery Experts

Modern eDiscovery tools connect to all the organization’s unstructured data locations. They identify relevant data and maintain an up-to-date index of the information before any data is collected.

With consistent, secure, and quick eDiscovery tools and processes, business leaders gain visibility into data in seconds, reduce the data sets to present to attorneys, and accelerate early case assessment. It all adds up to much lower eDiscovery costs.

The best time to prepare for litigation is now, long before a court order appears. The consultants and project managers at eGovernance.com help organizations practice efficient eDiscovery. And with deep knowledge of Office 365 and other pertinent technologies, they can assist modern data and identity governance.

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Connected Archiving Accelerates Business

Working from the cloud allows connected users to work anytime from anywhere. With more staff working remotely, easy access to the tools and information needed for individuals and organizations to perform their assigned roles becomes critical.

The Cloud removes the pain arising from lack of access and inadequate distribution by allowing for shared files, real time updates and easy information flow. With your data hosted in the cloud, you’ll accelerate projects, improve decision making and deliver better customer service.

Azure Hosted Secure eGovernance Cloud

• Full Microsoft security around Azure
• Regionalized deployments if required (U.S. only at this point)
• Multi-hosted archive system
• Redundant virtualized server resources

Scalable Storage Adjusts Quickly

Working from the Cloud provides scalability at a moment’s notice. Should the amount of data in discovery, processing or storage increase, the Cloud automatically adjusts to support it quickly and easily.

Acquire a new company or downsize an old division? Cloud storage scales on demand, meeting your needs the moment they appear.

Cloud Storage Trims IT Budgets

Locating data in the cloud maximizes all your IT dollars. The Cloud provides affordable storage and saves on balance sheet headaches and capital purchases. Forget about buying equipment, building out, and operating a data center or computer closet.

You’ll enjoy a significant savings on hardware, facilities, utilities, and other expenses required by traditional computing. Likewise, the purchase of multiple software licenses and onsite servers goes away. Therefore, moving to the cloud trims your IT budget in exciting ways.

eGovernance Cloud is eCare Supported

• All servers monitored by eMazzanti Network Operations Center
• Standard system alerts plus application alerts
• 24X7 Monitoring and management of systems
• Daily data physical backups
• Automated patch management
• Automated server refreshes

Data Secured in the Cloud

Moving to the Cloud often raises security concerns. Many believe that since the Cloud is accessible and inherently tied to the internet, it is more vulnerable to cyber-attack. However, all modern IT systems invariably connect to the Internet.

Hence, whether your systems reside on premise or in the cloud, the degree of vulnerability remains the same. The cloud might even be less vulnerable, given empty office situations and updates that cause down time.

Cloud computing operates as a distributed network. Without a high concentration of data in one place, recovery from an attack happens more quickly and easily.

eGovernance Cloud is Fully Managed

• Managed by qualified application administrators
• Zero risk of misconfiguration
• Elimination of privilege user caused data loss (compliance)
• Audited and authorized change control
• Ongoing review and pre-emptive remediation of issues

Recoverable

Hosting systems and storing documents on the cloud provides for an intelligent approach to disaster recovery. Man-made and natural disasters tend to damage equipment, shut off power, and incapacitate critical IT functions.

With today’s remote workforce, many hardware-centric IT department personnel can’t gain physical access to on-premises systems in an emergency. That may show up as a security risk if staff can’t actively or remotely patch and update the technology. With your data in the Cloud, you’ll enjoy redundancy and accessibility no matter what, should a disaster happen.

eGovernance Cloud is Secure and Recoverable

• Secured Azure environment with physical SOC2 compliance and encryption of all data at rest and in transit
• Data integrity with full hardware redundancy and data backups
• Fully administered (systems and application), reducing IT management overhead, costs, and potential misconfiguration
• Data secured from accidental or malicious destruction or alteration by all parties, including privileged users without formal requests and controls
• Available 24X7 from any location or from restricted locations with a 99.9% sustained uptime

Affordable and Connected Archiving

With a low monthly fee, eGovernance Cloud compares in cost to Microsoft Archiving but works much faster. It requires no administration, resulting in reduced IT overhead. Redundant storage and backup protect against disaster outages and data loss.

A flexible tool, eGovernance Cloud supports multiple and varied data sources, both cloud and local. Its quick search capabilities save expensive user and resource time. And its efficient open architecture allows for quick and easy export or migration of archived data.

At eMazzanti Technologies, we believe the CUSTOMER owns the data. Therefore, we have no restrictions on the export of data. In fact, we provide easy and economical options for exporting of data to industry standard formats or for migration directly to other solutions such as Microsoft 365.

We’re seeing a new normal for IT departments, archiving and compliance. The information governance experts at eMazzanti stand ready to address your archiving questions and concerns relating to the new and varied challenges you face.

The post Connected and Affordable Archiving from eGovernance Cloud appeared first on eGovernance.

Ultimately, the drawbacks of legacy archiving systems will outweigh the benefits they provide.

Legacy archiving systems rack up costs in several ways, including expensive upgrades, hard to get technical support, and incompatibility with current file types. In addition, they require expensive extra storage, create compliance headaches, and lack modern search capabilities.

Replace Legacy Archiving Systems with eGovernance Cloud

A versatile tool, eGovernance Cloud covers multiple data sources (both local and cloud). Quick search saves expensive resource time. And, its efficient open architecture makes archived data easily exported or migrated.

The eGovernance Cloud requires no administration, resulting in reduced IT overhead and cost. Redundant storage and backup protect data integrity.

With a low fixed fee, the eGovernance Cloud is comparable in cost to Microsoft Archiving with its per user fees. It incorporates a more sophisticated, easy to use, plain language search engine and superior eDiscovery capabilities. Users perform search and export operations in one half to one quarter of the time required by other systems.

eGovernance Cloud vs. Microsoft 365 eDiscovery

Microsoft provides multiple features within the Office 365, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft 365 Business packages. However, these features are tiered to the Microsoft Licensing levels. Thus, they may not provide uniform coverage across different license types within the organization.

Many organizations choose to license their Microsoft subscriptions based on job functions or requirements, providing email only accounts to some internal and external users and web only accounts to non-office staff. This can leave half the workforce without coverage for retention or formal eDiscovery.

The eGovernance Cloud provides uniform coverage across all Microsoft licensing levels. This allows organizations to provide discovery services for the entire organization. At the same time, they can deploy retention policies for data generated by basic enterprise and business licensing levels.

The Real Cost of eDiscovery

Too often, the cost of eDiscovery is assessed as the monetary value of the solution. Or in the case of Microsoft Office 365, the inclusive cost of a functional solution. More accurately, the predominant cost driver of eDiscovery is TIME.

Individuals performing discovery searches are typically in legal and compliance positions. These command higher salaries and therefore result in higher time costs associated with processing discovery requests.

The eGovernance Cloud enables personnel to effectively manage the organization’s discovery of electronic records. Users respond to eDiscovery requests rapidly and efficiently. They easily search, review, and reduce the content produced to just the relevant records more efficiently than with many competitive solutions.

Microsoft provides exceptional eDiscovery capabilities in its advanced eDiscovery tools offered through its E5/A5/G5 licensing levels. But these advanced features also come with the time cost of reindexing all identified discovery scope data prior to initiating any type of assessment.    Depending on the scope, this can add hours to the process of identifying and conducting initial validation searches.

In contrast, eGovernance Cloud eDiscovery keeps ALL data indexed and ready to search with no re-indexing. Auditors simply plug in the search criteria and get results almost instantaneously.  

This allows them to perform quick pre-searches of information before they conduct a formal eDiscovery case or determine what content is available before getting too far into the process.

The result is that valuable professional time can be minimized while still providing crucial discovery information.

Data and System Integrity

The eGovernance Cloud is hosted in Microsoft Azure. This provide all the safeguards, protection, and compliance certifications of a truly enterprise data center. It also ensures data protection through encryption, data compartmentalization, and backups.

eGovernance is driven by iPro Advanced eDiscovery and Analytics technology and managed by the eMazzanti eCare service. eCare provides 24×7 monitoring and management of the service including:

• • Automated patch management
  • Automated server refreshes
  • Daily data physical backups

eGovernance is fully managed by qualified iPro/eMazzanti administrators who provide proactive assessment of scheduled processes and ensure data accessibility. This results in:

• • Elimination of privilege user caused data loss (compliance)
  • Audited and authorized change control
  • Zero risk of data loss due to misconfiguration
  • Consistent availability of services when and if you need them.
  • Discovery assistance to help deal with critical and sensitive requests

Why eGovernance

Organizations save immensely in systems and storage costs when not having to factor in hardware replacement budgets. Add to that the cost of fixing, maintaining, and installing additional infrastructure. Then, consider these benefits:

• • Increased Security:
  • The Azure-based eGovernance Cloud lives in a secure datacenter with SOCS-2 compliance. It provides not only a physically secure environment, but data secured through encryption at rest and in transit.

• • Disaster Recovery:
    With Azure data center redundancy and automatic failover, organizations ensure that their systems continue to function in the event of hardware failures and even site outages.

• • Immediate Scalability:
    The Cloud allocates systems, ram, CPU time and disk storage on demand without the need for a team of skilled systems specialists onsite. Expensive resources that sit idle until required need not be acquired.

• • Availability:
    The cloud provides availability from just about any location with an internet connection and delivers 24X7 access to resources.

eGovernance is powered by iPRO, the leaders in discovery and litigation evidence support. Thus, business leaders move forward with confidence when migrating legacy archiving systems to this powerful solution.

Migrate Legacy Archiving Systems Painlessly

The migration experts at eMazzanti Technologies understand the challenges of migrating data from legacy email archiving solutions. They also know from decades of experience the advantages and disadvantages of moving it to the cloud. Through hundreds of legacy and Microsoft 365 migrations and years of working with clients of all sizes, we have streamlined the migration process.

Regardless of your current archiving system, we will help you extract a complete, defensible data set. We know the roadblocks, and we have the tools and expertise to overcome them, ensuring a smooth migration to the eMazzanti/iPro eGovernance Cloud.

Review the advantages of moving to the eGovernance Cloud.

The post Reduce costs by moving legacy archives to eGovernance cloud appeared first on eGovernance.