Unless Your Data Capacity is Unlimited, You Don’t Have Enough

Victor Limongelli From time to time an organization considering bringing electronic discovery in house will look at solutions that offer a fixed amount of data capacity for a fixed price --- say, 1 TB of capacity for a license fee of $200,000. Very often part of the prospective customer’s analysis is “How much capacity do we need”? The answer, unfortunately, is treated like a static arithmetic problem, with reasoning along the lines of “well, we average about 100 custodians per year, and our data per custodian averages about 8 GB, so if we buy 1 TB of capacity, we should be fine. Sure, we might get a few more custodians or a case with a bit more data, but we’ve built in a buffer in terms of capacity.”

Unfortunately, that type of analysis is fundamentally flawed because it vastly underestimates a key variable – the volume of data per custodian.

Looking at recent history, in the 2005 time frame it was common to see data volumes per custodian in the range of 1 GB. Nowadays, 8GB or 10GB per custodian occurs frequently. That is 8x or 10x the amount of data per custodian in a half-dozen years! If data continues to grow at that rate – and there is no indication data growth is slowing down – in six years data per custodian will be 50 GB to 100 GB! In other words, over the next half-dozen years, that 1 TB of capacity purchased for an in-house electronic discovery system will prove woefully inadequate, with 5 TB – 10 TB required – even if the number of cases and the number of custodians does not increase at all. That $200,000 software license will need to be expanded at least 5x, resulting in an additional license fee of $1,000,000 or more, and a total cost of ownership far in excess of what was originally planned. The situation, of course, will be much worse if the number of cases or number of custodians also increases.

That result is not surprising when one considers that, outside of the electronic discovery context, data volumes continue to grow, with no end in sight. The Economist reported last year that “The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years.” Similarly, a graphical representation of the growth of data storage is available here.

Given the ongoing explosion of electronic data, and the uncertainty about future cases and custodian numbers, doesn’t it make more sense to implement a system that does not restrict the number of cases, the number of custodians, or the amount of data? One of the goals of bringing the electronic discovery process in house is to achieve cost certainty, so that the legal budget is not bushwhacked by the growth of electronic discovery. The way to do that is to insist on a solution that offers unlimited data capacity, unlimited numbers of cases, and unlimited numbers of custodians.

Victor Limongelli is president and chief executive officer of Guidance Software.