A new era of enterprise information archiving

By Sean Glansbeek for Seven Days Technologies
Johannesburg, 14 May 2015

Actiance, the leader in compliance, security, archiving and e-discovery for all critical business communications, offers Context-Aware archiving for e-mail, social, and other real-time communications. Built on an architecture that is unique within the enterprise information archive market, Alcatraz simplifies governance and reduces the cost of e-discovery by displaying dynamic content in context.

Alcatraz overcomes the technical challenges of storing and managing complex social and collaborative content - a struggle for traditional archives. Alcatraz employs an object-based approach to store any type of content, extract rich metadata, and scale with ease. Traditional archives, on the other hand, convert and retain all communications as flat-file e-mails and are ill-suited to accommodate the interactive, dynamic commenting, replying, editing, and deleting that is characteristic of social content.

"The rising use of social media, unified communications and collaboration tools are well established in today's enterprise. With these rich communication channels come new layers of complexity and risk for organisations that must adhere to and comply with ever-changing legal and regulatory requirements," says Sean Glansbeek, Managing Director of Seven Days Technologies.

Being able to archive at scale is also crucial in managing today's exploding data volume and content types. To architect Alcatraz for cloud-scale, Actiance followed the successful model established by many mega-scale cloud applications, namely, creating a general-purpose object store that is fully indexed, massively parallel across all components, and offers a Google-like search experience.

10x ingestion rate

IT managers need to be able to collect and index the e-mail, chat and social communications of their workforces in real-time to allow legal and compliance teams to be ready to respond to litigation or a regulatory audit.

Alcatraz can ingest over 17 million messages per day (over 200 messages per second). Alternatively, it can be scaled further to meet the needs of the largest global organisations. These rates include indexing, a time-intensive process for other archives so data is ready to be searched within minutes.

10x search speed

Once data is archived, search speed is critical to allow investigators to meet production deadlines, avoid fines and protect their company brands. Alcatraz scales to meet the needs of today's largest organisations.

Alcatraz's Web-scale distributed architecture delivers a sub-second, Google-like search experience. Moreover, Alcatraz captures all forms of communications, not just e-mail, and displays the data threaded in its original format, allowing investigators to save a substantial amount of collection and review time.

10x export velocity

A final bottleneck in the e-discovery workflow is the transfer of data from the archive to an e-discovery platform for processing, analysis, review and production.Alcatraz helps organisations accelerate the process of e-discovery and produces over 250 messages per second by retrieving, formatting and creating PST/NSF, EDRM XML or HTML files for export. The net result is that Alcatraz can export a million messages in minutes.

"With Alcatraz, Actiance now provides a single governance platform for e-mail, unified communications, collaboration, social media and all other critical business communications across their entire information life cycle - from policy control to monitoring to archiving," concludes Glansbeek.

Actiance

Actiance is a global leader in communication, collaboration, and social media governance for the enterprise. Its governance platform is used by millions of professionals across dozens of industries. With the power of communication, collaboration, and social media at their fingertips, Actiance helps professionals everywhere to engage with customers and colleagues so they can unleash social business. The Actiance platform gives organisations the ability to ensure compliance for all their communications channels. It provides real-time content monitoring, centralised policy management, contextual capture of content and smart archiving which improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of e-discovery and helps protect users from malware and accidental or malicious leakage of information. Actiance supports all leading social media, unified communications, collaboration, and IM platforms, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), Twitter, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Skype, IBM, (IBM), Jive (JIVE), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Salesforce.com (CRM).

Seven Days Technologies

Seven Days Technologies (SevenDaysTech) is a data security provider offering solutions and strategies that cover mobile device and information security, secure data collaboration, SharePoint security and compliance, data classification, file share security and compliance, Web content compliance, data leakage prevention, endpoint encryption and network auditing and reporting. SevenDaysTech also offers data risk assessments so companies can see where their data is going, who is using it, and what devices are connecting to the network.

SevenDaysTech covers Africa and Indian Ocean Islands and also has a distributed partner channel.

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A new era of enterprise information archiving

Actiance's Alcatraz overcomes the technical challenges of storing and managing complex social and collaborative content, says Sean Glansbeek, MD of Seven Days Technologies.