Relativity

The Challenge: Taking a Trusted Platform to the Cloud

More than 13,000 organizations around the world use the Relativity e-discovery platform to manage large volumes of data and quickly identify key issues during litigation, internal investigations, and compliance projects. Relativity has over 160,000 users in more than 40 countries from organizations like the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 70 Fortune 100 companies, and all of the American Law 200.

At RelativityFest 2016, the company announced RelativityOne, a secure and comprehensive SaaS product. They then unveiled their new self-service portal, a cloud-based, custom lab automation application that simultaneously provided over 500 attendees with an auto-provisioned environment.

The stage for this announcement had been set before the announcement. The success of the portal and RelativityOne hinged on the right cloud environment. So, Relativity turned to Microsoft because they had a Microsoft stack, and the technology and business proposition of Azure made sense for the company. They felt that Azure afforded them the best way to stay on top of industry movement and client demands.

The RelativityOne decision was sound for the business, but it was a massive undertaking with a number of challenges. Relativity had 62 environments and 995 servers with no way to know if those servers were alike. At the same time, they wanted to develop software more rapidly, which meant that their slowest links had to go faster. So, a big part of this project was configuration management, setting up new environments, and enabling their software developers to work at the speed they were capable of.