eDiscovery Roadshow

This week we completed our Australia-wide roadshow around eDiscovery focusing on the impact of the new Federal Court practice notes that are expected at any time. I had the pleasure of MC'ing the event and introducing our 3 guest speakers for the FREE breakfast technology briefings. First up was Dr Bradley Schatz from Vincents Chartered Accountants in Brisbane. Bradley is a world-renowned expert in computer forensics and one of 6 people to hold a doctorate in the subject. Bradley presented to the audience his views, in a very informative keynote, on eDiscovery, computer forensics and the new federal court practice notes that will impact almost every organisation in Australia.

Following this, I introduced two of Oracle's leading pre-sales architects - Peter Elford in Canberra, Brisbane and Perth, Tim Gregory in Melbourne and Sydney - to the audience. Oracle presented its Universal Online Archive (UOA) solution which forms the infrastructure repository against which any type of content can be stored, managed and protected for pro-active eDiscovery.

Tim and Peter also provided a demonstration of the image capture solution (ex-Captovation) that forms an integral part of the Oracle solution for eDiscovery. Dealing with extensive volumes of paperwork is something that organisations will have to contend with for a few more years yet. Oracle provides the ability to scan and acquire paper as digitised images and then ingest this information into the archive. This is the same type of solution as offered to ERP applications users for environments such as 'Accounts Payable' where invoice processing is required.

Finally, David Edson from Hyro presented his views on large-scale ECM system implementations. Hyro have worked with Oracle on a number of system implementations and have experience most of what can go wrong with an IT project. Hyro are offering a free half-day workshop to the event attendees to run through an organisations requirements and to advise on an appropriate strategy moving forward.

Congratulations to the winners of the Penfolds Grange handed out at the end of each event.

The 5 events were attended by almost 300 delegates representing around 200 different organisations. If we missed you at these events and you want to know more - please contact us directly. We are in the middle of processing the evaluation forms collected at the events and will be arranging follow-up sessions in the next few months.

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Paul


(l to r) Tim Gregory (Oracle), David Edson (Hyro), Dr. Bradley Schatz (Vincents) and Paul Ricketts (Oracle)

eDiscovery Customer and Partner Event

In August 2008, Oracle is hosting an eDiscovery event with two strategic partners across Australia. Presenting with Oracle will be Vincents and Hyro - two strategic partners working with us on this initiative.

You can register to attend by clicking here.

The event will be informative if you are interested in learning more about eDiscovery and want to see how solutions from Oracle can help you in the future.

This will be a multi-city event across Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth and will educate on the new practice notes that came into effect on the 1st July 2008. Oracle will be previewing its Universal Online Archive solution that provides a proactive repository within which an organisations information assets can be stored and managed effectively.

We look forward to welcoming you to these events and meeting you in person.

Paul

Unstructured Information Management a Problem? There is an Answer!

A recent Varonis Systems funded survey of 870 IT professionals found that only 23% believed unstructured data stored by their companies is properly secured and protected.

BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY THAT THIS IS NOTHING NEW!

Unstructured information has ALWAYS been difficult to store and protect when so many organisations still rely on antiquated and outdated solutions that include simple file-system and PST environments. ECM solutions, and let's face the truth here, have existed for almost 20 years as mainstream-solutions to this very problem. Today's technologies allow for the automated categorisation and classification of unstructured information in an efficient and controlled manner and there is really no excuse for this result other that apathy and complacency in existence across these organisations.

Let's look at where unstructured information comes from...

1. Desktop document/presentation/spreadsheet tools and I'll use Microsoft Office as an example here. These solutions allow users to store their unstructured information, as a choice, on their local or network drives.
2. Email systems allowing users to create and store their unstructured information in, for example, a PST file on their local or network drives.
3. Workgroup tools, and I will include SharePoint in this, that allow users to store information more effectively that on their local or network drives - but still within a Silo.

Organisations are being taken down the path of ensuring that unstructured information is discoverable - this drive is coming predominately through legislative changes but also through knowledge management initiatives. To enable an organisation to respond to these drivers, an Enterprise-Class Content Management solution MUST be enabled that encompasses the management of office, email and 'siloed' information environments.

This is a blog that is contributed to by Oracle employees so it should come as no surprise to read that I will say, here and now, we have a solution to your unstructured information management problems - and we are far from being alone in the market. The issue, and this comes from 9 years of experience in this space, is that it is the business units that need to drive IT into providing a solution and not the other way around. Traditional solutions driven by IT address very specific requirements - I have lots of employees to manage therefore I need an HRMS, I have lots of customers to manage therefore I need a CRMS. The answer to the question of 'I have lots of documents to manage, how do I do so' is unfortunately answered on the whole with 'we already have a solution, it's called Windows Explorer and you can store your information on the network'.

The problem here is that once stored, either locally or 'on the network' - it is pretty difficult to provide access to anybody else - unless you've configured an enterprise indexing/search tool and this happens to be configured to look at all drives across the corporate systems. A centralised repository, that maybe deployed across multiple geographies and business units, really does help here. The Oracle solution for eDiscovery for example, is called Universal Online Archive and will eventually have the capability to store any corporate unstructured or semi-structured information.

The survey goes on to say, and I quote here, '61% of respondents say they cannot keep track of which users access specific unstructured data, and 91% say their organisations lack the ability to determine data ownership because of faulty governance policies and a lack of available storage tools that can remedy the problem'. Of course, the problem cannot be simply addressed through the implementation of technology. If it could, we would have every IT manager around the world knocking on our (collective) doors demanding that we sell them our latest and greatest solution right now as it represents the answer to all their prayers!

Organisations do have to develop maturity around unstructured information management if they are to succeed in solving their core issues that will eventuate into a successful ECM implementation. Policies and procedures is a good place to start for managing important corporate information. Educating their personnel is another place to go to - developing a message that storing emails in a PST file is a really bad this for the organisation as a whole and taking this out to every employee is another important message. Developing a taxonomy against which unstructured information is classified is equally as relevant for a large organisations.

The survey closes by stating the obvious - it is not a question of money, IT departments always have funding for projects that reduce costs and risks to the organisation - it is a question of the organisation simply not knowing where to start resolving the issue because of the complexities involved in managing unstructured information.

Here again, companies like Oracle have consultancy practices that really, truly and definitely CAN help!

Paul

Viacom vs. YouTube - an eDiscovery Event in the Making

News broke this week that Viacom has been successful in its application to get hold of information from YouTube on its users interactions with content hosted by the site. Initially, the legal proceedings commenced in March 2007 after Viacom had identified around 160,000 video clips hosted by YouTube that had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. This is yet another example of a very public mega-litigation case between two organisations that focusses on electronic information held by one party being access by another.

All this is perfectly legal, and has existed around the globe in various juristictions for a number of years. In this case, Viacom will gain access to more than 12 terabytes of information - and as you can imagine there will be months (years even) of effort to establish the facts of the case. YouTube will be preparing their own defence - the costs for this action are going to be astronomical.

Now this is US based litigation, the laws that side of the ocean have been around for a few years now. Here in Australia, we are starting to see legislation (currently practice notes) coming into effect. Starting on July 1 this year, organisations across Australia are required to maintain appropriate records of all information including physical, eMail, ERP, CRM, HRMS and ECM systems. Where litigation cases of a certain size (over 200 documents) go through the court system, evidence must be produced electronically. The new privacy laws passed through Senate require organisations to maintain personal information in an encrypted manner and where loss of data occurs - this must be publically disclosed.

Whilst these new procedures may cause concern for some organisations, there are solutions available. Oracle, for example, announced its Universal Online Archive which allows for a scalable archiving environment that can initially be deployed for the main problem area for an organisation, eMail, but will over time allow for any unstructured, semi-structured or structured information to be held securely. Implementing this will go a long way to protecting an organisation from escalating costs and risks where frequent- or mega-litigation occurs.

Wikipedia has a number of great articles to read around eDiscovery and electronic evidence. I have provided these links here......

Wikipedia article on Digital Evidence
Wikipedia article on Electronic Evidence
Wikipedia article on Discovery Law

Oracle is running a series of events across Australia during August 2008. We will post details of these in the next few weeks - if litigation is an issue and you want to learn more, we would welcome you to attend one of these events.

Paul

More lost or stolen data

Michael Specht posted an interesting article on his blog regarding the continual problem of organisation loosing sensitive information. I posted a reply outlinning some other challenges around data protection. This is indeed an area where Oracle has a significant value proposition to help protect an organisation.

When you look at where sensitive data resides it often sits on some type of system that has Oracle involvement. Either simple the data may reside on an Oracle database, be access via an Oracle Application or rights granted from Oracle's Identity Management Suite.

So with the complexities of modern enterprise organisations where do you start ?. A good place is the security tool that in a few minutes can give you a high level overveiw on your current data risk. Once you know yor risk it then depends on the individual organisations appetite for risk. Public sector and FSI for instance need to treat data protection and the privacy of their employee's and customers with the utmost respect. While other organisations perhaps in manufacturing dont have the same customer issues since they deal with B2B and hence looking after their own employee's tax file number and bank details could be enough.

Oracle does excel in several significant areas of data protection including Information Rights Management to help lock down sensitive information that could be leaked outside of the firewall. Idnetity Management has an excellent attestation capability to give you an accurate view on who has access to what. Once you know who has access to what Enterprise Role Manager can help you digest and manage the complex relationships between the organisational business roles and IT system levels of privilages access. With IDM and ERM you no have a clear picture of who has access to what. But then due to various access rights and privilage creep you still can benefit from preventative and detective controls to close the loop.

With Datavault protecting your Oracle systems a company can be assured that the super user's are not violating privacy policies by masking or preventing access to sensitive data on the database. Or AuditVault can be used as a method of deploying a secure audit capability that will prove who accessed what critical or confidential peice of information. Auditvault not only looks after Oracle databases that are typically at the core of an organisation but ende databases by other vendors that are typically used at the departmental level and outside of the tight contols associated with a datacenter.

If you or your customer is concerned with privacy, or intellectual propery theft or leakage. Is wondering what the impending eDiscovery legislation means to you or the Privacy Act ammendments then talk to Oracle today.
Cheers
Carl Terrantroy

Oracle Universal Online Archive Has Analysts Buzzing

Oracle Universal Online Archive (UOA) is getting positive notice in the email archiving space. According to Ovum Research: "This is another demonstration of the bringing to fruition the combined capabilities of both the Oracle and former Stellent teams, melding understanding of content types with that of high volume storage. Good move, very timely."



Oracle recently announced its latest offering to help organisations manage their information. This product, the Oracle Universal Online Archive, provides a secure repository accessible through an Open API including pre-defined web-services. The repository provides record retention and disposition management, auto-classification and information de-duplication for any type of corporate information including structured data from applications and semi-structured and unstructured data from desktop-systems, collaborative interfaces, scanned or faxed imaged, audio from telephony systems and video from closed-circuit security systems as examples.

By far, the leading source of information within an organisation is within the email system. The first release of the Universal Online Archive solution addresses this precise issue by supporting email management from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and a more generic SMTP interface. This integration allows for a filtered set of all inbound and outbound emails to be captured and stored within the repository. The repositories data de-duplication solution allows for single-point storage of these emails dramatically reducing the storage overhead for the archive in this environment.

An organisations' intellectual property is most often held within semi-structured and unstructured information formats including Microsoft Office formats, blogs, wiki’s and other solutions. The archive allows for this information to be ingested and managed securely within the repository alongside emails. The same set of retention and disposition policies can be applied to all formats of data held within the repository and information can be auto-classified in the same way also.

Data held in a financials solution can also be managed by the online archive repository as can data from HRMS, CRM and even an ERP solution and yes, we support SAP here as well!

Being based upon Oracle’s 11g platform, the archive provides you with unparalled scalability and all 11g database options are enabled including RAC. A wide-range of back-end storage platforms are natively supported including EMC, HDS, IBM and Pillar Datasystems Axiom product that offers equivalent storage and capacity at roughly a quarter of the price of its competition.

Oracle's research and development team has built a set of tools around the archive repository ensuring that data ingestion as well as data-analysis occurs with industry-leading performance and responsiveness.

Of course, the primary reason for implementing an archive is to support eDiscovery activities that could include legal-litigation against an organisation.

eDiscovery is a 7-step process for most organisations - reducing potentially millions of items of information down to the level of hundreds relevant to the activity. The Oracle Universal Online Archive is designed to provide an organisation with a secure, online repository of all corporate content. This ensures that in the event of an eDiscovery event taking place – there is no need, or at least a significantly reduced need, to load information from either paper of from disk-drives.

This means that organisation's can see significant reductions in costs associated with eDiscovery as well as reducing risk. New Australian legislation, currently in the court system, will enforce a requirement to adequately retain and dispose of corporate information in preparation for eDiscovery and in particular – litigation. Oracle’s Universal Online Archive solution is the only end-to-end platform that is capable of storing ANY corporate asset including documents, audio and video alongside structured data from your core-systems including CRM, HRMS and ERP.

Congratulations to Seamus Byrne...

who I found out this week has been appointed COO of eDiscovery Tools - a provider of solutions for the legal industry in dealing with searches/discovery within a customer environment, usually as a result of litigation.

eDiscovery Tool's products are successfully used by a Global 100 legal, government legal and service bureaus - their premium e-discovery software products process, analyze and manage electronically stored information (ESI) to help organisations discover all the evidence required during a litigation event for example.

I wish Seamus well in his new venture and look forward to working with him in the future.

Paul