A new “intelligent” information governance solution has been announced by Symantec, combining its Clearwell ediscovery purchase with Enterprise Vault. Meanwhile the company also announced the $US115 million acquisition of  LiveOffice, a privately-held cloud-based archiving service as well as plans for increased integration between its leading storage and eDiscovery offerings.

Symantec can now offer a choice between on-premise, cloud or hybrid delivery of its “Intelligent Information Governance.”

The intelligence derives from Symantec’s Clearwell eDiscovery Platform which is expected to have the only collector certified by Symantec to collect directly from Symantec Enterprise Vault. This can allow users to collect content at scale from Enterprise Vault in the same manner they collect from other data sources over the network using the collection management console, accelerating collections and avoiding archive performance degradation.

Additionally, by leveraging Enterprise Vault’s existing index and Data Classification Services tags, users can perform targeted collections by providing metadata and keyword filters, specifying collection criteria via a simple point-and-click interface. Symantec’s Clearwell eDiscovery Platform also is expected to be able to preserve archived information in Symantec Enterprise Vault in place, thereby reducing risk and streamlining the eDiscovery process.

Symantec says the integration of Enterprise Vault and Clearwell will enable organisations to reduce their eDiscovery costs from information management through production, reduce their risk by improving the defensibility and repeatability of their processes, and streamline their processes to meet legal and regulatory deadlines.

Meanwhile the addition of LiveOffice will provide a hosted alternative for storage of email, instant message, social media and file sharing.