On Monday, January 28, 2013, Nuix, a provider of information management and information governance software, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, launched its next generation Luminate platform. In Nuix’s words, “the Nuix Luminate platform provides powerful technology and defensible processes to light up dark data so you can reduce storage, eDiscovery and investigation costs, fix records management shortcomings, de-risk organizations and open up new sources of business value.”
The litigiousness of modern society has created a conflicting division between business leaders who want to leverage technology to create new value, and the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) leaders who seek to protect the enterprise from litigation and hostile competitive activity. In the middle of this conflict, is the IT department whose charter is to serve the enterprise as a whole, but find themselves conflicted between protecting and persisting data that business leaders can use to gain insight to create innovation and competitive advantage; the need to optimize the capacity of data stored; with the need to minimize exposure to legal attacks (which in turn, necessitates the optimization of data retained, but deliberately minimizes, and in some cases eliminates, data).
Solutions such as Nuix Luminate are necessary in finding that very careful balance between business value and business risk and exposure. In Nuix terms, the “dark data” that exists in all enterprises are likely the data that poses minimal business value, but possibly the highest risk.
Nuix’s Australian background highlights an important, but often forgotten reality; that we live in a global world in which enterprises are exposed to the laws, restrictions and regulations of multiple nations. These nations sometimes have conflicting views, and therefore have conflicting compliance requirements.
Nuix’s success is a testament and a criticism on the isolation of e- and legal discovery. Despite the rich bundles of software available from information management vendors, discovery has been generally left to evolve and mature on its own. The Luminate platform is expected to provide a bridge between e- and legal discovery and other forms of information discovery used for creating business value.
On broad based terms, e- and legal discovery is one of many discovery activities in which enterprises engage continuously. Neuralytix
believes that by demonstrating and leveraging its 13 years of success in protecting enterprises against legal risks and exposure through its solutions and products that with the proper marketing investments, that it has the ability to extend its success to more generalized discovery activities that will be viewed by business leaders as more proactive and generate more positive value.
Despite the relative ignorance of the e- and legal discovery processes by many business and IT leaders, it has nonetheless garnered numerous large IT vendors into the space, including Symantec, EMC, IBM and CommVault.
The broader IT community, with its cynicism and skepticism towards Big Data notwithstanding, is giving e- and legal discovery the attention and appreciation it needs to demonstrate that discovery technologies bring to the economic well-being of enterprises.