Linked: Ongoing M365 Tenant Upgrades/Migrations
Greg raises the red flag on what is essentially the reality for many organizations now, that our cloud providers will constantly be patching, updating, and changing, the platforms where we need to perform collections as part of the eDiscovery process.
“Once upon a time we had dev/test environments where we could run validation tests on major software releases before we applied those upgrades to our production environment. Now providers roll out huge changes to infrastructure, features and performance with minimal or no notice. Using a dedicated eDiscovery platform to apply holds or run searches in M365, G-Suite or other cloud data sources may not protect you from issues introduced during upgrades. Agile/Sprint development cycles have radically increased the rate of new feature releases and eDiscovery modules are dependent on the core platform services. While automated QC systems have improved, eDiscovery seems to be the ultimate stress test of any content management system.”
It’s not normal for us to be using a platform that works one way, then changes and works another way two weeks later, but that is absolutely the way the Agile development is going to happen. The decision to change will be pushed by the business case for making the change, eDiscovery will be a second thought, if a thought at all.
That means two things in my mind in addition to the things Greg lays out in his post below.
1. You have to test, test, test. Constantly. You have to stay on top of new features, old feature changes, undocumented changes, etc.
2. The legal industry as a whole is going to have to get a lot more comfortable with “good faith efforts” being a little more of a gray area as these changes get made. What we could collect easily before, may require a lot more time and effort today, or it may not be possible today because of a bug in a recent update.
It’s going to happen. Whether you want to talk about M365, Google, cloud document management, cloud review platforms, or even cloud backups. Things will happen beyond our ability to control them, and those things will impact eDiscovery. Are we going to be OK accepting that?
Follow these topics: Links, LitigationSupport, Microsoft
