Office 365 eDiscovery

Office 365 eDiscovery with Mimecast

Mimecast offers an all-in-one solution for email archiving, continuity and security with tools that reduce the cost and complexity of Office 365 eDiscovery. Mimecast Cloud Archive is an industry-leading, cloud-based email archive that lets organizations centrally manage litigation hold for Office 365 and accelerate Office 365 eDiscovery with near real-time searches of live and archived email.

To protect email data from loss and corruption, Mimecast stores three tamper-proof and encrypted copies of every message in multiple data centers. In addition to capturing email content, Mimecast retains metadata that includes the proof of delivery and non-repudiation information that is often required in legal proceedings. Mimecast stores both the original message and any policy-mandated changes.

With rapid and granular search functionality and an archive that combines live and historic email, Mimecast helps to speed Office 365 eDiscovery and simplify early case assessment tasks. Administrators can use a single, web-based console to manage multiple litigation holds as well as SEC 17a 4 compliance and compliance with other frameworks. And email retention policy can be easily enforced and automated throughout the organization to take email retention decisions out of the hands ofeand users.

What is Office 365 eDiscovery?

Microsoft Office 365 provides capabilities for eDiscovery, the process of identifying, collecting, reviewing and exchanging electronic information for use as evidence in legal cases. eDiscovery tools in Office 365 enable users to search for content in Exchange Online mailboxes, Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive for Gusiness sites as well as Skype for Business conversations.

What eDiscovery tools are available in Office 365?

Office 365 eDiscovery tools include:

• Content Search eDiscovery tool, which enables users to search for email, documents, instant message conversations and other items within Office 365.
• eDiscovery Cases in the Security and Compliance Center. Microsoft provides tools for managing eDiscovery cases, adding members, determining what types of actions members can perform, placing holds on content locations and associating multiple searches with a single case.
• Advanced eDiscovery in Microsoft 365 offers an end-to-end workflow for preserving, collecting, reviewing, analyzing and exporting content for internal and external investigations. This solution also enables legal teams to manage the legal hold notification workflow.

What are the advantages of Office 365 eDiscovery?

Benefits of Office 365 eDiscovery include:

• Automation. Enhanced remediation minimizes the need for users to manually remediate unsearchable content.
• Speed. Office 365 eDiscovery enables users to place content on hold in Office 365 without moving it to another archive for preservation.
• Savings. Office 365 eDiscovery can help search for and identify relevant content quickly and easily, with less need for manual review and less content that needs to be sent to third-party reviewers.
• Availability. Office 365 eDiscovery is available globally to respond to legal and compliance needs or for internal investigations.

What are the limitations of Office 365 eDiscovery?

While Office 365 eDiscovery offers a broad range of tools, there are a number of limitations that organizations migrating to Office 365 will need to address.

1. The Office 365 Security and Compliance Center, which includes eDiscovery and preservation policies, does not provide uniform tools across all subscriptions.
2. Organizations that want to deploy enterprise-wide litigation holds may be frustrated by restrictions that Office 365 places on litigation hold features for end-user mailboxes.
3. Performance can be limited in Office 365 eDiscovery – some users have experienced slow results or variations in the accuracy of searches.
4. In the basic subscription, Office 365 eDiscovery performs searches without analysis capabilities, which can result in search results with duplicate files, unindexed items and potential false positives. This excess in data can add significant costs for third-party review services.
5. Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery can’t match the robust functionality of third-party review tools, particularly for processing and review.
6. Leveraging advanced functionality can be complicated and may require companies to hire an in-house analyst or counsel.

How to address the gaps in Office 365 eDiscovery?

Most organizations will need to augment Office 365 with additional solutions for eDiscovery that can manage outside data sources and provide additional functionality. To complement the abilities of Office 365 eDiscovery, organizations should look for solutions that offer:

• A cloud SaaS solution that can scale easily as needed while reducing operational and capital costs.
• An archive that provides a single repository for archived and live email that enables comprehensive eDiscovery across mobile and stationary devices.
• Litigation holds that can be deployed rapidly and managed centrally.
• Comprehensive data retention policies with in-depth control over data purge requests by clients to satisfy GDPR and other regulatory requirements.
• Easy-to-use tools and self-service options that simplify eDiscovery, legal and compliance efforts.