It has long been recognized, the importance of corporate IT services, to the success of the in house corporate legal function, and the criticality for timeliness, and accuracy to in-house legal departments, and indeed external corporate legal requests.
Requests for information, evidence and data audit results, have typically been a reactive, urgent matter, for internal IT resources “as we need the information yesterday”, and possible litigation and corporate risk are imminent.
IT professionals, network specialists, digital investigators are continually being asked to provide information, urgently, and typically, involving the acquisition and collection of information from near ancient IT infrastructures, where a myriad of independent information silos, operating systems, access rights, ensure the task is arduous at best.
Many corporations, however, are taking a much more proactive position, and in fact deploying an investigative infrastructure that, with minimal cost, or maintenance, can address up to 90% of in house legal requests, in less than half the time, while dramatically reducing existing legal corporate costs.
The key component to an investigative infrastructure, is a scalable, network enabled technology, which is purpose built, specifically for evidence and data collection functions. The very same infrastructure can also drive network data audits, data leakage identification and the remediation or erasure of unauthorized data.
In reality, Asian corporations are not faced with the same degree of litigious actions as counterparts in, say the US, or Europe, but nonetheless still require equivalent levels of defensible, accurate, and timely information collection. Multinational corporations are also required to adhere to there corporate head office requests, such as eDiscovery.
IT professionals, together with Security Administrators, are fast deploying infrastructures whereby investigations and evidence collection can be done network wide from a single end point, or computer, to a regional multi machine search and evidence collection process that does not cause disruption, or downtime to computers or servers. This infrastructure can be pushed out to existing IT networks, and do not require IT overhauls, nor significant capital expenditures.
Everything from fraud investigations, or digital forensics, to legal discovery or “eDiscovery” can be performed across entire networks, at lightning speed, freeing in house counsels to concentrate on the legal review process.