The Challenge

There are over 15,000 regulations in the U.S. alone that govern the handling of data

Financial reporting and auditing, environmental and product safety, consumer privacy protection...the operational areas affected by governmental and industry regulation, and the frequency with which those regulations change, presents a formidable business challenge.

An Agile Business Responds

In the face of this challenge, an agile organization stays abreast of regulatory change, quickly determining the relevance of new regulations to its own operations, and swiftly putting compliance measures into place as well as effectively monitoring and reporting on compliance efforts.

The Exalead Solution

Exalead CloudView™ enables this kind of agility, whether deployed as a standalone search-based Compliance application (see search-based applications), or as an embedded search engine within a comprehensive Compliance suite. CloudView can serve as:

• A Competitive Intelligence (CI) Tool

  For monitoring potential regulatory change across a customizable set of sources (e.g., industry and government websites, news feeds, and blogs), thereby better positioning the organization to shape potential regulation as well as to respond effectively to change (see Business Intelligence)

• A Text Analysis and Monitoring Tool

  To minimize the manual review of documents and identify hidden compliance risks, for example, a text mining tool that can spot check sources like email or chat transcripts for inappropriate disclosures of regulated data

• A Global Search and Reporting System

  That can reach across all data silos, enabling a cost effective, decentralized (at the source) archiving strategy

Added Value for Assets

As an added benefit, the use of a search platform allows a business to easily reuse the data it is required to gather for regulatory compliance for other business applications, enabling it to extract significant value from what would otherwise be a straight cost of doing business.

Learn More

To discover how Web-derived search technologies in general are bringing radical new agility to the enterprise, download our whitepaper, Achieving Business Agility with Search-Based Technologies and The Increasing Importance of Search in the Electronic Discovery Process.. See also our solutions briefs, Search-Based Applications and Get More Out of Your Databases with SBAs

The Challenge

Large companies face on average 556 lawsuits each, with 50 new lawsuits filed annually

A 2007 survey by law firm Fulbright & Jaworski LLP noted that large companies face on average 556 lawsuits each, with 50 new suits filed annually. To survive in this hostile environment, an agile business needs to be able identify and address legal risks before they evolve into litigation, and to respond swiftly and efficiently to discovery demands when matters do proceed to the courts.

Meeting the demands of these regulations requires fast access and control over relevant structured and unstructured information spread across silos in the enterprise information cloud, a challenge that has been difficult for existing Compliance and Discovery tools to meet.

The Exalead Solution

Whether deployed as a standalone search-based eDiscovery application (see search-based applications), or as an embedded search engine within a comprehensive eDiscovery suite, Exalead CloudView, removes these barriers. It provides unified information presentation, search and reporting across petabytes of data—regardless of format or location—enabling companies to:

• Better identify nascent legal risks
• Respond more quickly and more accurately to Discovery demands

Better Identify Legal Risks

To identify risks at an early stage, when they are more likely to be resolved without resorting to legal action, agile organizations are using next generation search engines like CloudView to monitor communications (for instance, email, instant messaging, or phone communications) for:

Instant Access to the Needle in the Haystack

"Having the ability to access archives momentarily regardless of where they are stored is critical to the successful outcome of any ediscovery response."

– Michael Mastine, Director of Product Management, Messaging Architects

• Inappropriate content (offensive words and terms)
• Inappropriate or unauthorized transmission of personal data (social security numbers, birth dates, medical information, etc.)
• Unauthorized disclosure of financial data (account numbers, salaries, etc.)
• Unlawful communication of 'insider' data (information regarding mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, unpublished results, etc.)

Agile companies are further leveraging search engines to identify potentially litigious issues with customers, employees and shareholders by using a Competitive Intelligence SBA to monitor company 'buzz' on the Internet (see Business Intelligence).

Proactive Relationship Management

In addition, proactive organizations are reducing legal risks by deploying state-of-the-art customer, employee and stakeholder management systems to build trust and loyalty, facilitate communication and aid problem resolution. Such applications typically leverage advanced search engine technologies to integrate high volumes of unstructured content like email messages, web pages and text documents. This 'wide-net' produces a holistic, 360° view of customers, employees and stakeholders— a comprehensive vision impossible to achieve using traditional database technologies. (See Smart CRM.)

Respond More Quickly and Accurately to Discovery Demands

Forester research shows that less than 20% of companies consider themselves well-prepared for eDiscovery issues

To respond effectively to discovery demands and litigation hold requests, companies are increasingly using sophisticated eDiscovery systems that can archive, mine and filter staggering volumes of unstructured and structured digital data, and route that data through efficient and cost-effective eDiscovery workflow processes. Some of these eDiscovery systems are comprehensive suites that use an embedded search engine like CloudView to facilitate large-scale information access and management, others are rapidly constructed SBAs that may be more limited in workflow functionality, but which fulfill the vast majority of most organizations' Discovery needs inexpensively and non-intrusively.

Learn More

To discover how Web-derived search technologies in general are bringing radical new agility to the enterprise, download our whitepapers, Achieving Business Agility with Search-Based Technologies and The Increasing Importance of Search in the Electronic Discovery Process. See also our solutions briefs, Search-Based Applications and Get More Out of Your Databases with SBAs