In the last post on AWS CloudSearch, I provided a tutorial on the creation of a simple CloudSearch domain for Supreme Court decisions. This walkthrough described the steps of creating a domain, configuring access policies and indexing, populating the index, and using the search API. We were left with a functioning case search database.
From a technical perspective, one key difference between this example and many real-world applications is that we let the CloudSearch tools automatically decide what fields and content were available to search. While this worked well in the previous example, I want to provide a concrete example of a context in which custom services and development provide more value – eDiscovery.
Imagine you’re a smaller law firm that specializes in HR disputes. As part of a time-sensitive non-solicitation claim filed by your client, you’ve subpoenaed email from fifteen employees at a client’s competitor. It’s Friday afternoon at 5PM, and you finally receive a hard drive with the emails. However, in an effort to overwhelm your small team, the competitor has produced the emails as individual RFC822 (.eml) files instead of a single Outlook PST file. You aren’t sure when you’ll be able to dig through the emails, and you already have a team of lawyers and legal assistants waiting.
Combined with the right service provider (like Bommarito Consulting!), AWS CloudSearch is a perfect solution for this problem. Before CloudSearch, existing available on-site infrastructure constrained the provision of eDiscovery services. eDiscovery service providers had to make large capital expenditures on servers and storage to meet peak customer demand, and sometimes the capacity just wasn’t there when needed. This led to high fixed costs, which in turn forced providers to charge higher prices to customers. From the provider’s perspective, expensive server infrastructure was also underutilized for much of the year.
CloudSearch makes these problems disappear. In our example above, building a “Google” for your subpoenaed emails can be done in just hours. The core components are an RFC822 parser to populate the search domain and a front-end user interface for searching and visualizing the results. If this service sounds valuable to your business, today or just potentially valuable in the future, don’t hesitate to reach out.