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This time last year I made 10 predictions (11 actually) about trends in unstructured data. Looking over them now, it’s fair to say I got 10 from 10 right. But rather than playing it safe again this year, I thought I’d be a bit more daring with my forecasts. Let’s see how good my predictive powers are this time around.
Cybersecurity is not Going Away
In fact, it’s safe to say it will become an even more pervasive issue for businesses, government agencies, law enforcement, and service providers such as advisory firms and litigation support vendors. Attackers are finding ever-cleverer ways of gaining access to resources—everything from phishing emails to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Can we stop the bad guys from getting in? It seems not. As we’ve been saying all year, this means organizations will need to focus more on what happens after the breach: Reducing the time lag from detection to remediation.
This doesn’t mean organizations should throw out their firewalls and network monitoring solutions, but they will need to integrate them with automated and manual incident response systems.
People Need to Search Their Data in the Cloud
Migrating data to the cloud continues to be a big trend and an overwhelmingly positive move for organizations that do it. But among the negatives—and many organizations may not have considered this when they decided to move their data—is that most cloud storage systems are places to store your data but are fairly unsophisticated when it comes to searching it. Moving data to the cloud will continue throughout 2015, and the growth of our Intelligent Migration business demonstrates this, but they will start to realize they need search it properly as well.
Organizations Will Form Data-searching Supergroups
Some of the world’s biggest companies will form single internal teams to tackle tasks such as investigations, incident response, forensic collection, and in some cases eDiscovery. It’s easy to understand why: It’s all just searching data. It’s harder to understand why so many organizations maintain the silos that historically separated these related activities. We’re already seeing this consolidation in some Nuix customers, especially in the finance sector.
The Slow Ramp-up of Information Governance Will Accelerate
Organizations have been talking about information governance for quite a few years now, but practical examples are still thin on the ground. I think the momentum is there and we’ll see the rubber hit the road in a lot of IG projects in 2015. Companies are focusing their IG vision around three main capabilities:
How can I understand what’s in my data?
How can I classify data into separate buckets: Really important, really useless, contracts, out of date, duplicated, and so on?
How can I apply an action to that data once I’ve classified it? Copy it, move it, delete it, make it more searchable, export it, quarantine it, and the rest. That last element of IG needs to happen across all my data, whether it’s a few terabytes or many petabytes.
And Then There Were Two
Consolidation is getting serious in the eDiscovery software market. By the end of 2015, there will be two main eDiscovery software providers for litigation support and law firms: Nuix and kCura. kCura will invest in the Relativity processing engine and Nuix will develop its early case assessment platform Web Review & Analytics. Ultimately, Nuix will be the winner in this market because we’ll provide the fastest access to data, with interactive visualizations and an early case assessment approach to review, on minimal hardware, at exceptionally competitive prices.
Investigators Need Data Access Everywhere
National law enforcement agencies, and some of the big regional ones, will achieve huge productivity benefits by providing centralized processing of digital evidence and giving investigators in the field rapid, secure, web-based access to search it. The law enforcement community is recognizing the importance of:
- Being able to analyse all evidence sources in a case at once
- Providing secure remote access to evidence
- Visually analysing, mapping, and interacting with evidence though an intuitive user interface.
These capabilities combined have the practical effect that you don’t need to be a forensic technician to be an electronic investigator. And that means, I’ve said it before, preventing more crimes and catching more bad guys.
About the Author
Eddie Sheehy has been the CEO of Nuix since 2006. He has overseen commercializing and growing Nuix on a global scale across more than 45 countries. Born and educated in Ireland, he has more than 20 years international and domestic experience in high-growth finance and technology businesses He holds a BCom, MBS (Finance).