IDOL | Integrated Architecture | Consolidated Archive

Integrated Architecture for Operational Information Management and Information Risk Management

In an enterprise information management infrastructure, there are silos of information being processed and stored in disparate applications, file stores and databases. These are referred to as the operational systems including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) such as financial management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle Management, and Supply Chain Management applications. Even more important to the lifeblood of the enterprise are its communication systems and applications such as email, IM, VoIP, Website, Internet, Customer Contact Center and video conferencing. These systems support the operations of the company and contain "live" data in hundreds or even thousands of file formats.

In addition to operational information, compliance, litigation and regulations necessitate a second, parallel set of systems to keep information safe. These systems include Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Records Management, Enterprise Archiving Systems, Policy Management and eDiscovery. In many cases, the systems contain multiple copies of the same or near-duplicated data and the information is stored in archives or on digital media (i.e. backup tapes).

This counter-intuitive approach of having two completely separate IT infrastructures is costly and cumbersome but also introduces more risk as information is copied, moved and often stored in-perpetuity. Additionally, each of these systems has to be "plumbed into" multiple times for application integration, enterprise search and eDiscovery. Indexing and analysis of information is being performed over and over again, costing significant amounts of time and money and even worse, information in different systems cannot be automatically interrelated.

When it comes to eDiscovery, in-house counsel and IT alike get to experience the time and costs associated with accessing each data source across operational and risk management systems, for every custodian and each active litigation case. It is no real surprise, based on understanding the information management challenges, that eDiscovery for a case can run into the millions of dollars and hundreds of man-months of manual labor. The risk of missing a critical piece of evidence or failing to apply a legal hold can be even more costly both in fines and for the company reputation.

Autonomy takes a different approach to accessing, processing and analyzing enterprise information by bringing the two worlds together. By providing an enterprise-wide information infrastructure that transparently indexes and accesses all data formats, there is no longer a need to separately plumb each data source. Information stored in a voice recording can automatically be correlated to transactional data from a stock trading system. Analysis can be performed simultaneously across live systems and archived information, regardless of where it is located. This significantly decreases both the risk of duplicated information and the cycle times, effort and costs of eDiscovery preservation, processing, analysis, production and presentation tasks downstream.

There is no longer a need to maintain and install two sets of information processing infrastructures. Instead of creating thousands of new connections to content repositories, the ZANTAZ eDiscovery solution needs only to connect to Autonomy's IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) because it accesses both live and archived data.

This integrated architecture, unifying enterprise search, archiving and eDiscovery has a number of significant benefits:

• Solve historically distinct problems – operational information processing, archiving and discovery – with a single solution and with no need to move data
• Consistent enforcement of legal holds and retention policy
• Unmatched efficiency, flexibility and consistency of search results
• Automated retention management & legal hold decisions based on the understanding of the entire corpus of data
• Reduced risk of data spoliation
• Flexible option to leave sensitive data in the operational layer or move to the archive at any point in time
• Significantly lowered installation and maintenance costs