Metadata comes in layers, from simple file metadata (who created something, when, how big, where it is located) to more complex metadata, such as an index can be created by examining the contents of a document and extracting what is relevant to the document to create a more sophisticated level of metadata. Digital Reef gives the user the choice of determining the level of granularity of metadata use. IT may first want to understand in general terms what is available by first using simple file metadata, but then drill down to full content indexing to create a richer set of metadata as that would be needed to comply with the majority of eDiscovery requests.
Note that the virtual governance warehouse is a very powerful answer to the question of what and where your data is. Digital Reef says that the overhead for a fully content-indexed warehouse is roughly 25 percent or your original storage. Digital Reef has a trademarked name for its architecture for the warehouse called TeraPerformance. It claims the necessary scalability and performance to meet even a large enterprise's requirements, i.e., 17.3 terabytes per day of full content discovery and indexing.
How important is this sort of warehouse? Very. Now some vendors may be able to offer an alternative approach that delivers similar performance, and others may eventually adopt a similar technology, but Digital Reef has laid down the gauntlet by delivering a product today. Note that the warehouse does not understand all data. Structured data, such as for relational database transaction processing systems, are not included. But semi-structured and unstructured data makes up a large percentage of business information and is often essential in eDiscovery. Fundamentally, you can't govern what you don't know. Going back to college math, the warehouse is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
The virtual governance warehouse helps provide the visibility step and Digital Reef provides two additional steps to satisfy the sufficiency requirement--insight and control--necessary to make the warehouse useful in actually taking required business actions.
Insight comes about from applying analytics to the metadata. For example, in order to satisfy an eDiscovery request, only information relevant to the legal matter at hand needs to be identified. Standard full Boolean keyword search is, of course, part of this process, but more sophistical analytical processes, such as context and concept searches, which can relate individual pieces to information to each other are also available.
