Electronic discovery (also called e-discovery or ediscovery) refers to any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it for internal company use or as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. E-discovery can be carried out offline on a particular computer or it can be done in a network.  Court-ordered or government sanctioned hacking for the purpose of obtaining critical evidence is also a type of e-discovery.

The nature of digital data makes it extremely well-suited to investigation. For one thing, digital data can be electronically searched with ease, whereas paper documents must be scrutinized manually. Furthermore, digital data is difficult or impossible to completely destroy, particularly if it gets into a network. This is because the data appears on multiple hard drives and because digital files, even if deleted, can be undeleted. In fact, the only reliable way to destroy a computer file is to physically destroy every hard drive where the file has been stored.

There is a crisis because the cost of providing energy is rising and some datacentre hotspots risk being unable to get enough power to run the datacentres. For every watt of electricity used to power servers, datacentres are typically consuming two to three watts on cooling. Worldwide, the cost of electricity is going up, and while some businesses may have the option to relocate their datacentres to areas where there is a cheap and abundant electricity supply, many more will not have that option.