Office 365 E-discovery

Office 365 E-discovery 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 e-discovery. 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 e-discovery 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 e-discovery 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.

FAQs: Office 365 E-discovery

What is Office 365 e-discovery?

Microsoft Office 365 provides capabilities for e-discovery, the process of identifying, collecting, reviewing and exchanging electronic information for use as evidence in legal cases. E-discovery 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 e-discovery tools are available in Office 365?

Office 365 e-discovery tools include:

• Content Search e-discovery tool, which enables users to search for email, documents, instant message conversations and other items within Office 365.
• E-discovery Cases in the Security and Compliance Center. Microsoft provides tools for managing e-discovery 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 e-discovery 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 e-discovery?

Benefits of Office 365 e-discovery include:

• Automation. Enhanced remediation minimizes the need for users to manually remediate unsearchable content.
• Speed. Office 365 e-discovery enables users to place content on hold in Office 365 without moving it to another archive for preservation.
• Savings. Office 365 e-discovery 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 e-discovery is available globally to respond to legal and compliance needs or for internal investigations.

What are the limitations of Office 365 e-discovery?

While Office 365 e-discovery 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 e-discovery 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 e-discovery – some users have experienced slow results or variations in the accuracy of searches.
4. In the basic subscription, Office 365 e-discovery 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 e-discovery 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 e-discovery?

Most organizations will need to augment Office 365 with additional solutions for e-discovery that can manage outside data sources and provide additional functionality. To complement the abilities of Office 365 e-discovery, 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 e-discovery 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 e-discovery, legal and compliance efforts.