E-Discovery and Litigation Data
Modern Data Sources
Cloud discovery covers data in software-as-a-service applications, cloud storage, and hosted platforms. Access depends on the provider's export capabilities and the organization's administrative rights under its subscription.
Possession, custody, and control turns on contractual rights rather than physical location.
Alternative Names:
Cloud Discovery, SaaS Data Discovery
Why it Matters?
Control is contractual in the cloud, so an organization generally has possession, custody, and control of data it can access through administrative rights even though it sits on a vendor's infrastructure. That answers most disputes about whether cloud data must be produced. The practical constraint is export capability, since some applications provide limited or unusable export, which is an accessibility argument grounded in fact rather than convenience.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Is cloud-hosted data within a party's control?
What limits cloud collection?
