Have you ever been sent looking for something, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be? We’ve all been there. Wallet, car-keys, children’s schoolbooks! Irritating, sure. A waste of time, definitely. But not the end of the world, right!
But what if what you’re looking for is a key piece of digital evidence in a criminal prosecution? Or a vital document in a competition or M&A investigation? You’re given a drive, or endpoint location and asked to find the needle in the haystack. So, where do you begin? And how do you prevent a minor irritation from becoming something far more serious?
Today’s digital environments are complex and massive. They can hold terabytes of information including files, contacts, documents, and images, to emails, social media, and user-generated content. They also contain the fragments left behind when someone knows they are being investigated and are trying to stay one step ahead.
This digital evidence can be vital to an internal investigation or legal case your company needs to defend itself in.
In 2016, IBM found that 60% of all cyber-attacks were carried out by insiders. The Council of Economic Advisors determined that malicious cyber activity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billion and $109 billion in 2016. People conducting malicious activity internally will try to hide their tracks, but you can find evidence of their behavior with the right tools.
Providing the right information by having a forensically repeatable process and by being able to locate the specific evidence allows you to identify and collect what you need without introducing superfluous information, saving time, and storage of data.
Losing something under a sofa doesn’t typically come with a substantial financial loss. Losing intellectual property at the hand of a disgruntled employee, or losing a contract dispute with a competitor, can run into millions in lost time, profits, and ancillary damages.
The bottom line, if you can’t find what you’re looking for or if it’s not in the right place, you need proper investigative tools that ensure you have a repeatable, defensible process that will stand up in a court of law.
Authored by Scott Saldinger, Sr. Account Executive, OpenText and Mike Stone, Sr. Account Executive, OpenText.
