Survival strategies by cloud or courier
Jinfo Blog

13th August 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Two new e-discovery tools offer yet more opportunity for companies to strengthen their compliance capability and squeeze the maximum amount of juice out of their customer data. But regulatory issues continue to emerge and, as ever, the cloud is at their heart. First comes enterprise feedback management specialist MarketTools, with its vision of a single solution for listening to what customers are saying across all channels – including social media, blogs, video, voice and email – with tools that capture and analyse it all ready for immediate action. Sure, its vision gives it an opportunity to puff the latest release of its CustomerSat solution – but it’s no less valid a vision for that (http://digbig.com/5bcehx). Then there’s Integreon, with its new Seek & Collect gizmo, which companies can plug into any device, capturing electronically stored information without the need for physical collection by forensic experts. Following a consultation between Integreon’s specialists and their client’s counsel about the critical files needed for preservation, Integreon configures the device to gather forensically sound copies of the files and their directories, relieving companies of the need to trot around the globe collecting defensible evidence when litigation looms (http://digbig.com/5bcehy). Seek & Collect seems explicitly to avoid the cloud; a plug-and-play device collects the files and couriers return them to Integreon for storage and processing. But for almost all other aspects of business, more and more stuff is floating round in the cloud. According to a new report from Gartner, The Future of Search and Context in the Cloud, executives are less and less likely to balk at sensitive data leaving their premises and entering the cloud, because of the opportunities it offers for adding value through contextual data. By the end of 2015, Gartner predicts, more than 20% of revenue-facing external search installations will incorporate context gathered from cloud sources, compared with less than 2% now (http://digbig.com/5bcejb – registration required). A new book from BSI (the United Kingdom’s national standards agency) offers some timely advice on the issue of having your data floating round elsewhere. Managing Security in Outsourced and Offshored Environments (outline and purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bcejc) also quotes figures from the latest PriceWaterhouseCoopers Information Security Breaches Survey showing that 68% of large respondents had been asked by their customers to demonstrate their compliance with security standards, and 92% had had a security incident in the last year (http://digbig.com/5bcejd). Enterprise feedback management, compliance, context in the cloud – it all impacts on information managers’ work, but perhaps in a fairly tangential way when their day-to-day concerns are with things like content, licensing and costs. All the same, noticing what’s exercising companies at the moment, and looking for the transferrable skill opportunities that offers, sounds like a good survival tactic.

« Blog