Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
From Across the Pond: Hanzo and Website/Social Media Archiving for Compliance and E-Discovery
October 1, 2010
Many thanks to Mark Middleton, one of Hanzo's founders and its CEO, for taking John and I on a test drive of Hanzo's web archiving product yesterday. As our British friends would say, in a nutshell, "brilliant."
I was impressed by what Hanzo could do and John (predictably) was impressed by the underlying technology. Basically, Hanzo allows a corporation to archive some or all of its web presence,including websites, blogs, wikis, social media sites, etc. in a time-structured, easily searchable archive which it can maintain in accordance with its compliance requirements and records management policies.
Hanzo has been around for just four years, but its programmers have obviously been making good use of their time. It is impressive to see a web archiving product that can handle video, form posts, Flash and Ajax. It also supports Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and is moving to support additional social media sites. If there are private areas or private sites, so long as Hanzo is given the credentials, it can also archive that data. And it supports sequential and non-linear forms (beloved of FINRA agents).
Coca-Cola is one of Hanzo's largest customers – and obviously very happy with Hanzo. We watched in amazement as Mark pulled up Flash content from Coca-Cola's site and then secondary Flash content as well. Likewise, it can archive as many nested links, going down multiple levels, as the client desires.
How does Hanzo perform its feats of wizardry? Basically, Hanzo's programmers have written ground-up code that crawls as a browser would, downloading a site's "payload" and then executing the code. If there is a script in the code (say, a stock ticker), the script is executed and archived as of that date – something many other companies have not been able to achieve. The client can chose one or more browser formats – Internet Explorer 8 is often the browser of choice.
The data is stored in WARC (Web archive file standard) format in accordance with ISO 28500. However, and this is pretty cool, it can be exported in WARC format, as an image, as a PDF or in an EML wrapper for purposes of e-discovery – and yes, the metadata comes with it.
I was initially concerned that Hanzo is an English company and therefore worried about cross-border issues, which are thorny and expensive to deal with. But Hanzo, which is cloud-based, allows clients to select the location where data is to be stored, including the U.K., the U.S. and Asia.
So how is it priced? Like all archiving products, the scope of the work determines each customer's pricing. But in general, it is priced by "archive units" (for example, if you have a public website with a member's only area, that would be two archive units). On average, clients pay between $1,000-$5,000 per month per archive unit.
Mark, thanks again for all the time you spent with us and patiently answering John's barrage of technical questions. We also had fun with langugage, as the U.S. and U.K. are two countries separated by a common language. We are now clear on what "the big cheese" and "in our neck of the woods" mean to the Yanks. We very much enjoyed talking to Hanzo's Big Cheese. 🙂
Mark will be visiting the D.C. area some time this fall and we've invited him to do a demo at Sensei Enterprises – if you'd like to be invited (still working on the date), please drop me a line and I'll put you on the list. And if someone else in your law firm or company might like to see the demo, please pass this info along. Lunch and Learn or Pub Night Demo? As our ancestors might have said "The British are coming!" Sounds like a pub night to me.
Listen to the Podcast
