The Surprising Role of SaaS e-Discovery in Forensic Investigations

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation based shows and movies have generated a lot of interest in the world of forensic investigations. The popular crime drama series centered around skilled forensic investigators who used scientific evidence and technology to gain a clear picture of what happened, enabling them to effectively solve a wide range of criminal mysteries, like murders, thefts, and kidnappings.

What CSI didn’t mention is that forensic investigations are not limited to solving “street” crimes. Cybersecurity practitioners also use forensic techniques and tools to uncover and investigate corporate data security incidents and possible crimes. Thus, everything from fraud, employee misconduct, data mishandling, and intellectual property theft, to cybersecurity attacks and even regulatory non-compliance can fall under the purview of forensic cyber investigations.

And as with any forensic investigation, the investigation of corporate issues also starts with data and ends with evidence. Because, after all, “The evidence never lies”.

Corporate forensic investigators leverage large amounts of and different types of data to conduct investigations. This data allows them to reconstruct events, validate hypotheses, analyze root causes, arrive at conclusions, and present conclusions and recommendations. And today, a lot of this extremely useful data comes from SaaS applications and cloud data storage platforms. Vast amounts of valuable evidence can also hide in data archives and backups.

Sorting through vast amounts of data and putting together the full picture of what happened can be extremely time consuming. That’s why most IT security teams use digital tools to help surface, aggregate, and visualize that data for them much faster than they could if they analyzed data manually. This process, whether automated or manual, starts with finding the data they need.

Before investigators can leverage potential evidence hiding within SaaS applications, cloud data storage, and data backups, they need to conduct SaaS e-discovery. We’ll cover everything you ever wanted to know about SaaS e-discovery – and its surprising role in corporate forensic investigations.

What is SaaS e-discovery?

Software-as-a-service or SaaS is a critical enabler of the modern digital economy and business landscape. All over the world, companies in every industry now use cloud-based SaaS tools to:

• easily and cost-effectively access advanced technologies
• enhance employee productivity, and
• boost organizational efficiency and profitability.

SaaS applications are also useful for e-discovery.

E-discovery (electronic discovery) is the process of finding evidence in the form of electronically stored information (ESI) that can then be used in internal investigations like insider risk events or potential compliance violations, or for legal or criminal proceedings.

ESI could include:

• Online documents
• Emails
• Social media posts
• Instant messages
• Databases
• Website content
• Source code
• Digital images
• Digital videos

ESI could also include information stored within SaaS applications. The process of discovering this information is known as SaaS e-discovery.

SaaS e-discovery involves identifying, collecting, validating, analyzing, processing, preserving, producing, and presenting data from SaaS applications.

Unlike traditional e-discovery solutions that discover data-based evidence in on-premises systems and software, SaaS e-discovery is about discovering data-based evidence from SaaS applications and solutions. Also, where data collection with traditional e-discovery involves a lot of manual effort and is slow, error-prone; SaaS e-discovery is all about automated tools. These tools simplify and accelerate the process of discovering the data within SaaS applications and cloud-native storage solutions like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Slack.

Including these digital data sources in e-discovery increases the availability of useful data for analysis, evidence-gathering, and insights-generation to give your team the full picture of an incident or event. This then enables organizations to strengthen their understanding for HR investigations or exonerating an employee of responsibility in a security incident. These’ internal investigations may include:

• Identifying and addressing compliance gaps
• Internal HR investigations related to workplace misconduct, conflicts, sexual harassment
• Internal IT investigations to investigate cyberattacks and accelerate incident response
• Satisfy the requirements of a legal subpoena for digital user conversation logs
• Regulatory audits requiring historical user access logs from SaaS apps

The Forensic Value of Archived SaaS Data

Archived SaaS data is the legacy data that’s stored separately from the primary storage location. Data archiving can benefit organizations in many ways:

Numerous regulations, including HIPAA, mandate that organizations retain specific types of data for a set amount of time. Archiving helps companies comply with these laws.

Archiving also helps to simplify data management and reduces storage costs. It can also boost data security and decrease its exposure to prevalent risks like ransomware, accidental deletions, and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks that could cause you to fall out of compliance.

Archived data can also play an important role in e-discovery. In fact, when it comes to forensic and compliance investigations, archived data is often more revealing and therefore more useful than live data. IT teams are increasingly seeking to back up their archived data with a tool that supports searchability for this reason.

The following three use cases will show how.

#1: E-discovery with emails and metadata

Email – and associated metadata like sender name, recipient name, email send data, etc. – is one of the most important data types for e-discovery. Since email plays a vital role as evidence for incidents like data exfiltration, it’s important to preserve and secure it. That’s where email archiving comes in.

Email archiving is the practice of capturing all incoming and outgoing emails and storing them in a centralized repository. The archive ensures that all the email information needed for e-discovery is easily searchable, accessible, and exportable.

#2: E-discovery with user access trails

SaaS audit trails provide a detailed record of all the users that accessed the application and its data. This information can be very useful for identifying security gaps like excessive permissions, compromised credentials, or unnecessary privileges, or insider threats. It is also useful for legal e-discovery and for uncovering evidence related to risky or non-compliant user behaviors.

#3: Identify data tampering

Forensic tools can analyze archived data to identify instances of data tampering. Whether the tampering occurred due to an external event like hacking or due to the negligence, error, or malicious actions of employees, archived SaaS data allows investigators to “go back in time” in order to understand the historical actions that led to the tampering, uncover evidence of alteration, and prevent further tampering.

Challenges with Accessing Archived SaaS Data

We’ve seen how archived SaaS data can be a goldmine for e-discovery and forensic investigations. However, accessing this data can be very challenging. Here’s why.

Large Data Volumes and Wide Data Varieties

A single e-discovery case may require the investigator to collect large amounts of data. But first, they must know where the data archive is stored and have access to retrieve the necessary data. If the dataset is large, navigating it can be very tedious. In many situations, the investigator may have to coordinate with multiple data owners. This can be time-consuming and delay the e-discovery process. An archive backup that supports easy searches can help alleviate this burden.

API Roadblocks

APIs provide a defined set of rules and protocols that allow forensic investigators to systematically retrieve and validate archived SaaS data. However, they can also pose some challenges. For one, it can be hard to extract the required data if the SaaS application doesn’t provide a query interface. Also, users may have to use different query languages to handle different types of API queries. This can further complicate and delay data access.

Inconsistent Retention Policies Across Different Archiving Platforms

Using disparate archiving platforms leads to dispersed and inconsistent datasets that hinder e-discovery and compliance investigations. The lack of a centralized archiving repository also makes it hard to apply consistent retention policies, which can result in accidental data deletion and major data loss, increased storage costs, and may even lead to regulatory non-compliance.

Compliance Complexities

Regulations tend to vary in their data archival/  retention requirements. For example, HIPAA mandates that “certain types of documents must be maintained for six years from the date of their creation or from the date on which they were last in effect, whichever is later”, while GDPR simply states that “data must be stored for the shortest time possible”. These differences make it difficult to manage and maintain compliance across all regulations. Yet, non-compliance can create further problems, like regulatory fines, legal issues, and reputational damage. Setting different retention policies based on data types may be necessary to comply with multiple frameworks at the same time.

SaaS Backup Solutions for Reliable Data Protection and Better Forensic Outcomes

High-quality third-party SaaS backup solutions eliminate all the challenges associated with accessing SaaS data because they are scalable and easy to use. Some solutions like SpinBackup also include archiving functionality, which helps to minimize overall storage costs.

Compared to native backup tools within Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and other SaaS platforms, third-party backup solutions provide more reliable and secure offsite storage and point-in-time recovery. Through a single unified management console, investigators can automatically and simultaneously run multiple searches across SaaS applications and data. Furthermore, organizations can set custom data retention policies to get greater control over their data and achieve continuous compliance.

The best third-party data backup and recovery tools also include numerous features that ensure better forensic outcomes and will give you data portability assurance. If a provider does not give you portability assurances in writing, it’s best to consider how this might impact you later if you ever need to change providers.

SpinBackup for example, provides immutable data storage and granular backup of everything from emails and calendars, to contacts, files and shared drives – and your data will always remain your own. It also backs up metadata (timestamps, user IDs, file changes) on their hierarchy and sharing permissions. Users can retain the existing hierarchy and permissions while performing a comprehensive backup.

Investigators can leverage features like advanced search and real-time AI-enabled analytics to search the backups for e-discovery and corporate forensic investigations. They can also automatically apply legal holds, audit archives and backups, and export required data in a readable, user-friendly form. These capabilities enable organizations to fulfill their data retention responsibilities and comply with relevant regulations.

All in all, SaaS backup and e-discovery tools offer all these advantages over traditional e-discovery methods:

• Fewer errors: There’s no need for manual data collection and review, minimizing the potential for errors and inconsistencies.
• Efficient and fast. Automation also increases e-discovery speed, efficiency, and accuracy.
• Scalable. SaaS e-discovery tools can accommodate any number of SaaS applications and data volumes – while delivering high-quality e-discovery outcomes.
• Secure. Built-in security and privacy controls safeguard data from leaks and breaches.
• Real-time collaboration. Cloud-based tools can be accessed from any location, allowing multiple investigators to coordinate their efforts.
• Cost-effective. Most SaaS e-discovery vendors offer pay-as-you-go pricing, which helps reduce e-discovery costs.
• Compliance-friendly. Compliance-friendly SaaS data backups and audit trails ensure that data is always handled in a safe and compliant way.

Choosing the Right Third-party Backup Tool for Forensic Readiness

As we have seen, a SaaS backup tool can be a vital addition to your tech stack – not only to safeguard data from losses, but also to support e-discovery cases and forensic investigations. But for true forensic readiness, it’s crucial to select the right third-party backup tool. Such a tool should include all these features:

The only tool that ticks all these boxes: SpinBackup!

SpinBackup automatically collects and preserves ESI from all these applications for both external purposes (e.g., legal cases) and internal investigations (e.g., compliance).These capabilities are essential for data loss prevention, to accelerate recovery times, and to minimize business downtime.

Simplify SaaS Investigations and E-discovery with SpinBackup

Your SaaS data backup is not just insurance against data losses. It can also give you a powerful forensic advantage! Grab this advantage today with SpinBackup, a feature-rich SaaS data backup & disaster recovery solution from Spin.AI.

Offering powerful automated snapshot backups and secure cloud storage, SpinBackup ensures robust SaaS security for every possible use case. With SpinBackup, you get compliance-friendly cloud backups, easy searches, plus fast and accurate data recovery for your entire SaaS environment. Leverage its powerful features to strengthen your data protection process, avoid data loss disasters, and simplify e-discovery and internal compliance investigations in your organization.Discover how SpinBackup provides forensic-grade SaaS data recovery. Click here for a free demo!