Dr. Gavin Manes of Avansic, who recently said he used to be a cloud denier identifies the power and pitfalls of the cloud in his latest blog post!

His post (The Power of the Cloud – And Pitfalls to be Mindful of, available here) discusses the power and pitfalls of the cloud with some terrific examples of both, referencing the recent webinar that Gavin and I conducted with Jack Petracek (Manager at Lawgical Choice). For example:

“During the webinar, the panelists talked about major eDiscovery issues in the recent case Cabo Concepts Ltd. v. MGA Entertainment. In this case, a Microsoft Outlook desktop client was used for searching and collection. Although this is certainly not the first time Outlook has been used for eDiscovery data collection, it has fallen out of favor because of the way it indexes data or – perhaps more importantly – how it chooses not to index data. Outlook cannot perform optical character recognition (OCR) on non-character types, so it can’t search documents that don’t have text it can extract, for example, a scanned document or inbound fax that came as an attachment to an email. It also does not have a method of identifying the documents it wasn’t able to index, which results in silent failures. When a program fails without alerting a user, unexpected outcomes abound, which is not an ideal circumstance in eDiscovery and beyond.”

He also notes: “Fortunately, there are abundant tools and workflows for eDiscovery that most of the industry has adopted. But it is true on the road and in eDiscovery, that great cars can have bad drivers.”

Great analogy! And Gavin goes on to discuss several more examples of the power and pitfalls of the cloud. Check out his post here!

So, what do you think? Are you an advocate of the power of the cloud or are you more concerned about its pitfalls? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.