Alcatraz, Cloud-Based Archive by Actiance With Focus on Context

Actiance Inc., helping organizations benefit from communications, collaboration, and social networking, announced the launch of Alcatraz, a cloud-based archive that combines a focus on context with the requirements of an email archive.

The company reduces risk and cost across the information lifecycle of dynamic communications channels, from policy control and real time content monitoring to legal holds and records retention and disposal.

Increasing usage of all these communications tools is creating huge volumes of data. According to IDC’s 2012 Digital Universe study, worldwide data is expected to grow 50-fold from its 2010 levels by 2020, creating challenges for IT departments to manage this growth in-house.

On-premise archives were not designed to accommodate the nuances of social business content, where posted content can be changed by users easily. This leaves organizations exposed to a higher risk of data loss, sanctions, and increased eDiscovery costs. Being hosted in the cloud, IT scales with customer demand and facilitates more eDiscovery due to its understanding of new communication forms. It can also complement email archive solutions, so that existing infrastructures can continue to be leveraged.

The company has built upon its social governance vision – expanding on its vantage and socialite cloud solutions – and sets a standard in archiving with its focus on context. Traditional archives treat each interaction as an individual event as it is created. For instance, a single Facebook post with 30 comments is archived as 31 separate emails. This takes a different approach, starting from the construct of social content – retaining and retrieving content, even edits and deletes, as fully threaded, contextual conversations – and incorporating this alongside email. The solution also provides the ability to replicate what a blog or discussion board looked like at a particular point in time. This makes it easier for auditors, attorneys, and litigation support staff to find and assess content with accuracy, ultimately simplifying legal reviews and ensuring timely responses to discovery requests.

“Social information is rapidly becoming one of enterprises’ greatest challenges today as it is often excluded from traditional information archive processes,” said Laura Dubois, program VP, Storage, IDC. “Managing, archiving and discovering the growing volumes of social business information should be a high priority for any organization looking to achieve an effective information governance strategy. Solutions, such as Actiance’s Alcatraz are emerging to solve this challenge. Designed to embrace this new information paradigm, it enables organizations to have a true context-aware archive that embraces all corporate communication platforms, including social media, collaboration, social software and instant messaging in addition to email.“

In addition to archiving and eDiscovery capabilities, it provides capabilities for organization’s information governance strategy, including:

• Contextual retention, search, and review: Enterprise and public social, unified communications, and email content are retained in a single archive as threaded conversations, decreasing downstream legal costs by 36%.

• Recording of edits and deletes: Edited or deleted content is captured with all metadata, providing an reconstruction of who said what when.

• Open platform APIs: It facilitates ingestion of data from custom applications or third parties, forming a single repository upon which to conduct more efficient eDiscovery.

• Integration with Vantage and Socialite: Integration provides management of content from creation to disposal, facilitating information governance.

“As communications have evolved so have the requirements of our customers and the regulators. With Alcatraz we have risen to the challenge of putting the unique, dynamic nature of social content first and not defaulting to the flat format of a traditional archive,” said Kailash Ambwani, president and CEO, Actiance. “The ground breaking approach we’ve taken realizes our vision of delivering on the governance of the entire information life cycle – without compromise.“

Alcatraz is available to Socialite and Vantage customers as a beta, with availability in Q2 2014.