One week you’re handling a tiny eDiscovery matter with 5 gigabytes of data for review. The next, you’re swimming in a case with a terabyte of data (that’s roughly 35 million pages!). No matter the size of the case, you need a review platform, team, and workflow that can flex to handle a deluge of data yet not cost you an arm and a leg when the wave recedes, especially if a case settles unexpectedly and the need for eDiscovery drops overnight.

In short, you need a scalable approach to eDiscovery. By scalable, we mean a solution that is capable of growing—practically in the blink of an eye—in the following ways:

 ·       to accommodate a large number of users, who will tax the review database by requiring a large number of concurrent connections;

·       to accommodate a sizable document population, typically with more than 1 million records; and

·       to accommodate a data set full of large files, such as large images, large spreadsheets, and heavily redacted documents.

Not all discovery platforms are capable of handling these demands. Those that can’t are likely to cause long-running queries, file and disk latency, and user complaints. To avoid these problems, you need to know what to look for in a scalable eDiscovery platform.

Choose a Cloud-Based eDiscovery Platform to Avoid eDiscovery Headaches

With an on-premises eDiscovery solution, you need to predict how much data you’ll have and how many reviewers you’ll need. If your estimates are inaccurate, you might spend more than necessary, or you might have to scramble to add more servers to handle your needs—else you’ll be paying your reviewers to watch the blue circle of death swirl on their screens while documents load slowly instead of paying them to examine documents for relevance and privilege. And it may not be easy to get the capital expenditure approvals rapidly enough to get the additional hardware and software that you need.

However, if you choose a cloud-based eDiscovery platform, you’ll find that it’s incredibly flexible, so you can scale up or down on the fly. To ramp up your processing power, memory space, or storage, you can simply work with your provider to increase your plan. You never have to worry about whether you’ll hit the limits of your platform, while you won’t ever have to pay for more capacity than required.

There’s one other type of scalability we should mention too: economies of scale. Because cloud-based resources rely on shared and distributed resources, they cost less for both the eDiscovery provider and the end user. This savings allows providers to invest in advanced technology, so end users reap the benefits of the latest and greatest features. Meanwhile, providers can also spend more on robust physical and virtual security measures, so data is well protected from potential threats.

To learn more about the benefits of cloud-based eDiscovery and the scalability it offers for document review, get in touch.