Embracing eDiscovery in the cloud with security and certainty

If there was one pivotal “eureka” moment for government eDiscovery professionals, it might be finding the locus of accuracy, speed, economy, and flexibility to fuel their work. For a while now, users of Nuix Discover® for Government have found exactly that, benefiting from one of the world’s fastest and most precise eDiscovery platforms on the market.

Paving the way for governments to do more, faster

The public sector is performing the citizens’ work using technology systems that aren’t built for a digital world. These workforces are made of people who are accustomed to fast, intuitive consumer experiences they enjoy every day — and they expect these experiences from their work tools. Not only that, the U.S. federal government, as one of the largest producers of data, needs massive storage and processing capabilities to make data actionable. 85% of U.S. federal government executives say their organization is dependent on AI technologies to effectively function.

All of these dynamics make it imperative for government agencies to modernize and leverage the flexibility, shareability, scalability, and innovation offered by cloud-based solutions. Concerns over security prompted the U.S. government to establish the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP®) — a cost-effective, risk-based framework federal agencies can use to implement cloud services.

FedRAMP® High was “an easy decision”

On February 22, we hosted a webinar to walk customers through our FedRAMP authorization process and the functionality that the new cloud capability offers.

Zyad Nabbus, principal, DataLock Consulting Group, explained that we chose to go for the most rigorous FedRAMP authorization level — FedRAMP High Impact. This designation means that Nuix Discover for Government is authorized to process, store and transmit the most sensitive data in cloud computing environments. This includes systems where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability could have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect on organizational operations, organizational assets, or individuals.

To meet FedRAMP authorization standards, which took several months to complete, we made many security enhancements to our full technology stack. Nabbus described the project requirements by the numbers:

• 421 controls
• 17 security control domains
• 1,447 test cases
• Thousands of documents produced for policy, procedures, configuration management, contingencies and more

Additionally, we incorporated world-class end-to-end encryption to meet the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)140-2 as part of six (6) required federal mandates.

Emily Tice, eDiscovery expert and vice president of Professional Services at Nuix, said that while it was a big undertaking, “It was an easy decision to go for the High Impact Level. It provides customers a very high assurance that the data will be secure and protected.”

A customer view of eDiscovery in the Cloud

Webinar attendees also heard from Chotsani Sackey, eDiscovery counsel and records manager of the New York City Council. She presented a number of improvements her team has realized by using Nuix Discover’s cloud functionality.

“One of the things we appreciate the most is that we’re able to access and host the data in a secure, dedicated offsite cloud environment, and set security and permissions in such a way that keeps confidential information secure while giving users the functionality they need without friction.”

Sackey also pointed to several features that enable her team to work faster, with highly productive results.

• Early Case Management allows users to apply analytics and search capabilities not available in our email repository.
• Search Term Analysis cuts through the clutter, pinpointing both unique and non-useful data. It also calculates the effectiveness of the terms. “This feature helps us prioritize potentially responsive material and gives us a sense of terms we may need to revisit. These tools are very helpful in identifying the most relevant information at the beginning of the review,” said Sackey.
• Continuous Active Learning (CAL) trains Nuix Discover to score and pull documents that are more likely to be responsive — and also shows users the extent of documents that won’t be responsive. This helps the user gauge when to stop the review.
• Review Completion draws from CAL analytics to determine when a review can be completed because materials are no longer showing qualitative differences. “We can start running validation to see if we should continue or stop the review and pull a sample to ensure the remaining docs are no longer responsive. We can also see if they are responsive in a new way or in the same way as previous documents,” Sackey explains.

Recently released features — and what’s next

Emily Tice finished the presentation with a quick overview of the latest feature enhancements that will be of interest to Nuix Discover users.

• Case-to-Case Migrations is new functionality users will find especially helpful when multiple review cases draw from a staging case. The user can now move documents, coding, and annotations from one Nuix review case to another.
• Bulk Annotations allow users to accomplish “find and redact” across many documents at once. Redactions can be based on an ad hoc query or a list of saved terms. Terms can include advanced query syntaxes such as proximity, wildcards, and regular expressions.
• Autoscale Supervisors (AWS) will scale up or scale-down supervisor machines to meet the need as jobs are submitted to the processing framework, scaling the resources to meet demand automatically.

Be on the lookout for additional features coming in 2023, including natural language processing (NLP); enhanced chat integration for mobile, Teams, and Slack; and RPF job notifications via email.

What to learn more?

• Watch the webinar: Securely meet the most demanding eDiscovery obligations with Nuix.
• Find out more about Nuix Discover for Government. For specific questions or to set up a demo, email us at FedRAMP@NuixUSG.com.
• Better yet, join us at Nuix XLR8/23! See demonstrations, live Q&As, and get the inside scoop first.