Carasoft: Look for These FedRAMP E-Discovery Capabilities for Your State, Local & Federal Government Agency

Exterro and Carasoft recently joined forces to discuss the legal requests that federal agencies must automate in order to mitigate growing data risks—and how FedRAMP Authorized E-Discovery Software like Exterro's can save time and money.

Exterro's own Product Manager Dan Carroll was featured, and here's what Dan had to say about the critical capabilities that agencies need in order to be successful with today's security concerns: 

"Understand exactly what your agency typically deals with.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Exterro Product Manager Dan Carroll. “If you do a lot of criminal investigations, for example, you’ll probably want the tool to be able to do bit-by-bit disk imaging so you can look at encrypted data and deleted data. But for civil litigation, you might not need that. You might value the ability to collect conversations conducted via chat and piece them back together, or you might want to be able to automate the legal hold process.” It’s vital to look for software that can collect data for both use cases. A software platform that includes forensic and native file collection capabilities.

Verify that your e-discovery software platform can integrate easily with your agency’s other important data sources, enterprise infrastructure, applications and other tools. At the very least, the platform should include integrations with common collected data sources like the Office Suite, Google Suite, Box, Druva, Oracle, ServiceNow and existing archiving software. Even better is a platform that provides APIs that agencies can use and combine with their own. This allows agencies to easily pull data into the discovery platform from their custom applications or internal systems.

Choose the platform approach. This ensures that all capabilities are maintained under one umbrella, and helps create a comprehensive, long-term strategy. Standardizing on one platform that extends across the entire e-discovery workflow also ensures team members can communicate about data more easily, and the information is easier to find, collect, process and review all in one place. A single platform also makes it easier to add more functions down the road. For example, an agency might start with standard e-discovery functions, but find the need to add additional functions like data inventory, consent management, digital forensics capabilities, or incident and breach management, over time.

Look for an e-discovery platform with specific features. The platform should allow for role-based access, have rich auditing capabilities, and allows for customizable workflows. It should also provide a full audit trait with chronological records of access and changes to data. The audit trail should show when collections took place, the amount of data collected, and which user initiated the collection.

Make sure you can build complex queries. It’s imperative to have the ability to build complex queries that can search not only content of documents but metadata also is important. “You want to be able to get really specific,” Carroll explained. “You want to be able to look for certain keywords from a certain person between specific dates in communication with specific people, and run that search across electronic files, images, videos, scanned documents and other sources.”

Look for a platform that is intuitive and easy to use. Instead of having to devote hours to training users, look for a product that users can intuitive start using immediately."

To read the entire piece, which is packed with great information for government agencies of all types, click here or click on the banner at the top of this article.