Exterro acquires AccessData to address all legal GRC and digital investigation needs

Exterro announced it has acquired AccessData, a provider of digital forensic investigation technology.

The acquisition furthers Exterro’s vision of empowering customers to proactively and defensibly manage their legal governance, risk and compliance (GRC) obligations while maintaining and ensuring the highest levels of data integrity.

By combining forces with AccessData, Exterro can now provide companies, government agencies, law enforcement, law firms and legal service providers with the only solution available to address all Legal GRC and digital investigation needs in one integrated platform.

“Converging market forces in DFIR, e-discovery, privacy and information governance are the driving factors behind this acquisition. To effectively address these critical challenges requires the ability to identify, preserve, analyze and present data in a contextual manner, quickly and inexpensively. It also requires a consistent, defensible process,” said Bobby Balachandran, CEO at Exterro.

“Ensuring the integrity of the data supply chain is of the utmost importance. With the acquisition of AccessData, Exterro combines all of these capabilities in a single, integrated platform to give organizations a holistic framework for addressing their Legal GRC challenges and obligations.”

Organizations today are faced with continually expanding legal and regulatory obligations and ever-increasing security risks around their data and the data they hold on behalf of others.

However, there is significant overlap between critical components of data management, especially with regard to e-discovery, internal investigations, incident and breach response, and privacy.

AccessData’s forensic collection, processing and analysis capabilities complement and round out Exterro’s existing e-discovery, privacy, information governance, and incident and breach management solutions. With the combined technologies, domain expertise and superior track records of Exterro and AccessData, clients will benefit significantly in a variety of ways:

• Get to the facts more quickly and defensibly, at lower cost. No other company in the e-discovery market offers a truly comprehensive solution on a single unified platform that addresses every single phase of the e-discovery and forensic investigation process.
• Rapidly identify, preserve, analyze and present data stored across the enterprise. Offering the industry’s broadest set of connectors to enterprise data sources – including on-premise and cloud applications, new collaborative apps like Slack, mobile devices and PC operating systems – enables Exterro clients to identify, preserve, analyze and present data in a contextual manner, and to do so as quickly and inexpensively as possible within a consistent, defensible process.
• Quickly identify information risks across enterprise endpoints. The integration of AccessData’s technology with Exterro’s Legal GRC offerings allows the combined company to rapidly identify information risks and eliminate them before they become an issue.
• Establish advanced connections between discrete pieces of evidence. Battle-tested forensic tools such as AccessData’s market-leading investigation solution, FTK, shine when investigators need to conduct data-intensive investigations in less time. Integration of FTK with Exterro’s advanced machine learning will save valuable time and money, and expose “smoking gun” evidence sooner.
• Get deep visibility into live data directly at the endpoint. The combination of AccessData’s forensic tools and Exterro’s Incident and Breach Management™ solution will help organizations conduct faster, more targeted HR and compliance investigations and implement a consistent, documented, defensible response process in a single, robust solution.

With more than 3,000 existing clients, 500 employees spread out across global operations in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, and its strong financial position, Exterro will continue to aggressively invest in existing product lines like FTK and new innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence to address the growing demand from organizations to address their Legal GRC challenges.

“This is an exciting day for AccessData customers. As the leading Legal GRC technology provider, Exterro offers a portfolio that perfectly complements our own innovations,” said Ken Naumann, CEO at AccessData.

“The acquisition will bring tremendous new value to our users, helping them strengthen and defensibly accelerate end-to-end forensic investigations and e-discovery. Exterro shares our deep commitment to FTK and is dedicating significant resources and investment to drive additional innovation throughout the combined product lines, with the common goal of taking customer satisfaction to new heights while ensuring the highest level of data integrity.”