Outrageous demands (and what you can do about them)

Related to: Nuix NEO Investigations , Nuix NEO Data Privacy

Over the past two decades, we’ve developed increasingly sophisticated tools and methodologies to turn raw evidence into actionable intelligence. But in the past three years, we’ve seen exponential growth in the volume of data. For many of our customers, what used to work no longer does; you need to make it work – preferably without increasing costs.

You’re facing ridiculous demands but can get smart about it.

You probably already know the Nuix Engine is the best tool out there, so I’d like to talk about methodology. I’d like to walk you through the past and present to where we see the future of data processing in three key areas:

• Scaling your processing environment to meet varying (but inevitably growing) data volumes
• Integrating Nuix as part of a broader workflow
• Solving business problems, not just data challenges.

I’ll show you how you can answer the demands you face now and how you can get ahead of the curve and be ready to address tomorrow’s challenges.

 

SCALING

Before, you would run Nuix Workstation on a bunch of servers. Team members could have dedicated machines which they couldn’t fully utilize all the time or would look for ways to balance work across several common servers. A person would have to wait for each stage of the job to finish before kicking off the next one, leading to all kinds of inefficiency.

Now, you can log in to one Nuix Automation interface and manage utilization across a whole cluster of Nuix servers – as many as you have licenses for. You can load-balance jobs across multiple servers and queue up work so the hardware is always working. You can be certain the resources – your investment – are being utilized to the max and your team members spend less time clicking and more time thinking.

As we’ve heard customers say, putting in Nuix Automation doubled the value they get out of their Nuix environment.

Next, imagine an integrated platform that gave you practically infinite resources to process data, just when you needed them, but that didn’t cost a cent when you weren’t using them. Many of these features will be available in your current environment, but for true scaling, you need to reach for the sky.

We know many customers are cautious about the cloud. That’s why we have so many conversations with investigative teams who need to process emails from Microsoft 365 in an air-gapped environment, for example. The advantage of building something brand new is you can do better. We’ll make sure you have the right solution that complies with all your regulatory obligations and satisfies the most stringent CISO. 

The rewards? Cloud-to-cloud transfer speeds, limitless processing power, and moving data from problem to review as soon as it’s ready.

 

INTEGRATING

Before, if you wanted to use Nuix as part of a larger workflow, you had to transfer data manually – often physically – between different tools and platforms and do your best to standardize the steps you took with each tool. You might have developed custom scripting to perform more complex steps or to integrate with external tools. 

This approach has become cost-prohibitive: scripts grow exponentially more complex with each little bit you add. It’s more than a full-time job just to maintain your workflow and keep the business going, and that increases your risk if something breaks or a key person leaves.

Now, Nuix Automation does the heavy lifting – it strings together activities and processes data the best way, every time. Nuix Automation comes with a library of activities to handle common customer needs, and it can run scripts at any stage of the process.

This greatly reduces your need for custom-developed scripts and workflows – you can concentrate just on the specific steps that are unique to your needs, your own “secret sauce” on top of Nuix’s capabilities.

Next, we envisage the world of understanding data as an end-to-end effort, with Nuix Automation as the cornerstone. In the near future, Nuix Investigate® and Nuix Automation will work together to simplify the interactions of your processing and investigative teams. Beyond that, we’re planning to add unified connectors, collectors, and hooks into Nuix Discover®, to make it easy to acquire data, analyze it and – if you see something – go back to acquire or reprocess data and float it into the review platform. Seamlessly.

We’re also planning other areas we can provide value to our customers. How would you like detailed utilization reports (beyond job history) that would allow you to monitor needs and costs? Do you need another server, or can your current environment manage with better scheduling? Can you grab a script from our community, adapt a little and drop it in to create your own “secret sauce” activities? What about partner solutions, combining the power of Nuix with external expertise to address use cases such as investigating fraud and handling mergers and acquisitions?

 

SOLVING

No one processes data for the fun of it. Whether you have criminals to catch, terabytes of documents in litigation or regulations to keep on top of, shifting masses of data from “problem” to “solved” is just a necessary step in achieving your goals. So the question is, how can we help you succeed?

Before, you had more data to process than hours in the day and the only option was to buy more hardware and hire more people. By the time this environment was productive, your data volumes had grown again. With each additional server and team member, the effort grew exponentially.

Now, Nuix Automation allows you to control jobs across a cluster of servers. Taking servers in and out of the cluster makes it much easier to keep a pipeline of cases, whether to perform maintenance on individual servers or dedicate resources to ad-hoc projects. Since it’s such a visually simple solution, training users takes a fraction of the time before they’re out there being productive. Your team is left free to concentrate on what really matters: producing high-quality data for your clients (internal or external) to review and understand.

Next, we want to (re)think about what data processing means and looks like. We’re working with a select group of customers across many common use cases. By listening to their challenges and needs – and talking to industry analysts about where the world is heading – we’re building a different way to “do Nuix.” We’re looking for ways that fit naturally with how you do business – all in the service of getting you from “problem” to “solved” with minimum fuss.

Our software as a service initiative is one part of that. We’re working toward a subscribe-and-go model, with built-in case and evidence management. It’ll be a unified platform that allows cloud-to-cloud data acquisition, practically unlimited resources to store and process data, and review platforms that are easy to access and manage. For on-prem customers, we will offer similar experiences running in your own environment. 

Ultimately, we’re getting out of your way so you can concentrate on your goals and achieve them in ways and times that just weren’t possible before.