Information Risk Management

Lack of awareness of relevant information within the organization can result in duplication of effort, inefficiency and protracted data search, but these are relatively inconsequential when compared to the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to adhere to regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). In case law, under FRCP, "preservation" is interpreted as the goal of maintaining the integrity of all documents, data and tangible things reasonably anticipated to be subject to discovery. A company's failure to quickly impose a litigation hold on all responsive records can result in court-ordered sanctions.

Information Risk Management, or IRM, is the act of dynamically and automatically mitigating the risks endemic to the everyday production of excess amounts of data through intelligent archiving, automated policy management and advanced eDiscovery. Autonomy ZANTAZ is the only vendor to offer the full spectrum of IRM solutions. Powered by Autonomy's next generation Meaning Based Computing technology, Autonomy ZANTAZ solutions enable companies to benefit from complete control over all enterprise content for the entire information lifecycle.

Stages of the information lifecycle include:

Preventive Approach – Real-Time Policy Management

In order to prevent any possible malfeasance, companies can apply real-time policy management. These tools monitor activities in the organization to ensure that employees are adhering to corporate policies and regulatory compliance. Alerts are triggered when defined or suspicious activity occurs.

However, many technologies that attempt to address compliance issues require manual intervention and these technologies add minimal value to measuring the meaning and context of information. These nonscalable and processor-intensive approaches contrast sharply with automated tools that provide companies with advanced conceptual analytics for such needs as automated legal hold, and granular meaning-based policy creation.

Preparatory Approach - Archiving

Companies can and should gather and archive their data long before a lawsuit enters the halls, ensuring that all important information is retained in case of litigation. It is equally advisable to proactively and thoroughly dispose of information that is no longer required for operational, regulatory or legal purposes. Companies that achieve this level of proactive control are left with an optimized body of corporate information that includes all legally relevant documents, but excludes outdated information that is at best wasteful and at worst potentially incriminating. Increasingly, companies are deploying archiving solutions as a defensible, policy-based approach to both the collection and disposition of all kinds of corporate information, ranging from email to file systems, applications and databases. Companies are now requesting audio and video archiving, and undoubtedly demands for archiving more content types will follow. Consolidated archives are ready to help businesses as their archiving, retention and disposition needs expand.

Proactive Response Approach – Early Case Assessment (ECA)

When faced with litigation, companies typically must first collect, load, process and filter data before they can start to review the case properly. Hampered by nonscalable and slow technology, investigators could wait for months before they can assess the data to formulate a legal strategy. In contrast, companies are deploying Early Case Assessment software long before a case is filed to rapidly retrieve and analyze relevant data to answer the initial question, "Is there a case?" Users can access live and archived data to visually trace communications between protagonists to identify meaningful interactions. This allows legal teams to conduct ECA, and develop an initial strategy long before the "meet and confer."

Reactive Approach - eDiscovery

Companies that choose to wait to "discover" their data until they are actually faced with a lawsuit must overcome many challenges. The plaintiff already has the benefit of early discovery and the passing of time, so it is imperative to choose a solution that will expedite the review process with rapid, scalable content loading, advanced culling, automated operations and visualization tools.

Another expensive and time sensitive aspect of litigation is opposing party Electronic Data Discovery (EDD). This includes collecting the raw data, culling the data for potentially responsive information, exporting the resulting set of documents, performing de-duping and near-duplicate processing and then extracting the metadata from those documents to prepare the data in a litigation-ready format. Autonomy ZANTAZ electronic discovery solutions enable more effective workflow within the organization - standardizing security, review, analysis and production practices on a single platform to mitigate risks, decrease response time to discovery requests, handle many large cases, and ultimately, secure competitive advantage within the legal market.