Extract from Jim Gill’s article “What is SaaS Sprawl and How Does it Affect Enterprise Ediscovery?”
In ediscovery, most of the information collected during litigation involves email and other communication data (e.g. Slack and MS Teams). But the growing use of SaaS applications adds an additional element to the blanket term “collaboration data.”
These applications encompass many uses, including project management, ticketing services, content management, sales data, and more. And each of them usually contains a communications element using comments or built-in messaging channels. This dynamic functionality along with the easily adoptable nature of these applications creates a sprawl of complex sources of discoverable information across the enterprise data landscape.
How ubiquitous is SaaS sprawl? In a 2022 Hanzo blog, I cited a source that showed 99% of organizations were using one or more SaaS solutions at the end of 2021. And even more telling, according to the 2020 SaaS Trends Report, enterprises with employees ranging from 100-1000+, used on average 288 different applications within their organization. That study also cited a 60% app turnover rate, indicating a constant influx of new data sources continually introduced into an organization’s enterprise data stores.
