Hosting eDiscovery in the Cloud: Know What You’re Getting
"There is a lot of confusion over what constitutes the cloud. “Clouds” can be an umbrella term for pretty much anything at all that involves either storage pooling, delivery of some service over the Internet, or a nifty idea that came out of your marketing team’s Monday morning meeting. “Heh! Let’s call the product a cloud! Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
So let’s define some cloud terminology narrowed down by eDiscovery. Essentially eDiscovery applications and services are cloud-based when they are delivered online by third-party providers. Titles are fluid and indistinct, but a couple of the major examples include Software as a Service (SaaS) or cloud-based application delivery, and hosted eDiscovery or cloud-based eDiscovery. (Believe me, different vendors will define these terms according to what they think will sell the best.) Below are some decent working definitions."