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Data forensics, an increasingly important business practice, is a little more difficult to manage with a remote workforce. Ricoh's original Remlox product came out of the need to help organizations navigate information governance policies in an age where employees aren't always sitting together in the same office building. “The goal was to have exactly the same result as if we sent a forensic person on site to collect this in a traditional manner,” David Greetham, head of Ricoh's e-discovery business unit, told LTN.

The company this week launched Remlox Cloud, a cloud-based data forensics tool, as the latest iteration of the platform. The group touts the accessibility and security in data extraction offered through the cloud infrastructure.

Here's a look at the new tool:

Who it serves: Remlox Cloud can theoretically do forensic data extraction for any given use case, but Greetham pointed out two that might be of particular use. Operating a data forensics tool remotely can help organizations specifically deal with information governance around remote workers and contractors, for one.

Secondly, the Remlox Cloud platform is well optimized for speed, meaning that if legal holds or forensic data needs to be extracted and reviewed in a crisis situation, the platform can deliver. “Nobody wants to have a fire drill. Nobody wants that to be the case, but in reality sometimes in litigation that is the case,” Greetham said of the tool.

What it does: Once organizational teams decide what forensic data they need from a given users' computer, be it office documents, Quickbooks data, email messages or the like, they send a request to that user with a link via email. When the user clicks that link, Remlox Cloud deploys a script to collect all that data, encrypt it, and send it back to its cloud environment (the platform uses Microsoft Azure, a public cloud infrastructure). The process also comes along with a descriptive document that can be used to explain to courts how the process is compliant with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments governing proportionality.

Remlox Cloud's data ingestion plays well with e-discovery review tools like Relativity and Ricoh's own eDiscovery On Demand platform, and it uses a set of automated tools to help users manage that data once extracted. “We have much more automation than we've ever had before. We can reserve [data] for litigation hold—if you need to review this, we can automatically move it to On Demand. You could actually be reviewing it in the same day,” Greetham noted.

Why the cloud? Over the last few years, cloud-based platforms have established themselves as more than a passing fad. Cloud data hosting tends to have greater data protection and control mechanisms in place for security, and can be used to spool up or scale computing processes quickly, two things that have allowed the infrastructure to take hold of the industry.

Greetham said that Ricoh adopted the cloud infrastructure because “it gives us a flexibility and a scalability to be able to be agile and proactive. Really in our industry, it's a requirement to be a good business partner.”

How to avoid the potential for phishing: An email with a link that runs a script should at this point raise a million red flags for users that they might be on the receiving end of a phishing attack. Greetham said that when Ricoh was running beta testing for Remlox Cloud, they ran into this concern from users a lot.

To pacify users, the company encourages users to double check its security certificate and to confirm with an account administrator to verify the link within the body of the original email. “We realized a lot of it is how you present it and how you give them assurance,” Greetham said.