Aparavi Platform Exclusively Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Aparavi Software Corporation forged a new category in data management with the release of its Aparavi Platform, available exclusively on the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

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Microsoft Corp. and Aparavi partnership includes a joint go-to-market initiative with Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers.

The company’s Platform, is a paradigm shift from mere data management to data intelligence and automation tht immediately reduces the complexity ad cost of managing large unstructured data volumes. It enables data discovery with automated classification, data optimization (including removal), and migration to alternative data stores such as on-premises storage or major clouds. It gives users visibility and insight into data, and, more critically, triggers action based on its lifecycle, access requirement, content, risk level, regulatory policy, and hundreds of other criteria. It finds data across the boundaries of diverse systems and locations and unlocks its full value through search, index, and classification functions to create an organized virtual data lake for modern applications.

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Managing data lifecycles and effective information governance are priorities for enterprises. The firm’s platform provides intelligence into the data and its business relevance, finding data across the entire enterprise, regardless of where it resides, through automation tools that discover, classify, optimize, and enable innovation while reducing human error.

Earlier this year the company introduced its ‘Early Access Program’, which provides access and use of the firm’s products to a select set of customers and strategic partners before the rest of the market, along with direct access to the company’s product team. This program will continue and is open to new members aiding in shaping feature design, capabilities, and continuous improvement in end user experience. Among the many early adopters of the Platform were A.O. Smith, a manufacturer of hot water solutions for homes and businesses, and Modus, provider of information governance and eDiscovery solutions.

“We have over 30 years of data spread across data centers, servers, storage, and distributed endpoints and were challenged with finding the data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and reducing costs without introducing more complexity,” said Jim Solomon, director, infrastructure, A. O. Smith. “With Aparavi we have been able to find and drill down on the data easily and report and make decisions quickly, resulting in major reduction in time with significant cost savings in people resources and data infrastructure.“

“As specialists in data governance, The Aparavi Platform is helping our clients automate data management and control exponential licensing and infrastructure costs as their data grows,” said Steven Williams, VP, information governance, Modus. “Relevance is a critical factor in everything we do with clients and internal operations. We constantly need to know the significance and relevance of the information we manage and the ability to properly reduce the information we do not need.“

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The time and frustration involved in finding, accessing, and being able to govern data without cost and complexity is plaguing enterprises. According to an IDC survey, Unstructured, Undefined, Unknown: What Do You Really Know About Your Data?, March 2020, 66% of enterprise users admitted a lack of understanding the value of their own corporate data, and 31% of workers reported frustration at knowledge locked away in unstructured documents. Search occupied a 25% of their weekly tasks, and governance 21%.

“Data growth is a given, and tools that manage or assist with data privacy and risk are increasingly important,” said Ryan O’Leary, senior research analyst, legal, risk, and compliance, IDC. “Information governance and compliance are a top priority not only for IT workers but chief corporate officers and all departmental and line-of-business employees.“

“Companies simply cannot continue to hoard data ‘just in case’ while not having the slightest concept that they are just sitting on their most business-critical asset, with zero insight and zero ability to properly leverage it,” said Adrian Knapp, founder and CEO, Aparavi. “On top of that they continue to grossly misspend resources to continually move it from place to place instead of fully understanding it and putting it to work for the good of the business. Truly knowing your data immediately delivers greater business insight and allows you to optimize or right size the infrastructure to save corporations millions. Aparavi, The Platform saves firms up to 40% in infrastructure costs while gaining critical data insight and reducing risks – all of which ultimately ensures true competitive advantage.“

Platform addresses solution use cases of finding and controlling data, optimizing data availability for cost savings, and fueling innovation.

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Capabilities and benefits include:

• Classification, index, discovery, and reporting in one easy-to-use interface
  It provides data intelligence and management in one platform, rather than licensing numerous expensive complex products, and gives a clear understanding of unstructured data from cradle to grave. More than 140 predefined classifications address regulatory compliance for vertical industries and countries, with more than 800 patterns recognized.

• Automated control over all unstructured data
  Assign retention policies to unstructured data and automatically copy, move, and delete based on those policies. The platform empowers users with the insight to know what can, can’t, and should be deleted based on regulatory or nonregulatory requirements. It addresses all unstructured data down to the content and metadata level, including image and video files and their OCR text.

• Data visualization and cost analysis
  Understand what data exists, where it resides, who owns it, and how much it costs to maintain. The company aids in data and IT consolidation by identifying and classifying critical data and redundant, obsolete, trivial data that can be removed, typically delivering 30% to 40% savings in data infrastructure.

• Core to edge/cloud/endpoint support
  Users can manage risk, cost, and data sprawl no matter where unstructured data is stored. Alleviate risk and prevent data leakage across distributed repositories in data center storage, cloud storage, and even endpoints for a defensible deletion policy. This control makes it to comply with requests to remove data such as personally identifiable information (PII) for GDPR, CCPA compliance, and other regulations, as well as to meet subject access requests or legal holds.

• Storage-agnostic
  Unlike point solutions that are bound to their specific systems or single-purpose tools, the firm can discover and index data without requiring it to be copied, moved, or egressed first – further reducing cost and time to insight, while minimizing storage, security and performance impacts.

• Flexible deployment
  The platform is SaaS-based but has the flexibility to be deployed on-premises through the firm and authorized partners, for customers with unique needs.

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The platform SaaS version, is exclusively available on the Microsoft Azure marketplace as a part of the firm’s status with Microsoft that gives the company access to Microsoft CSPs with expertise in the use cases and workloads Aparavi addresses. It also gives vertical sales engagement in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, legal, and federal government.

Pricing for the platform starts at $1,788 /month for up to 50TB of data or 50 million files under management, with 5 classification policies for the Business Pack. A ‘Starter’ release of the Platform, supporting up to 5TB or five million files with one classification policy, is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace at no charge. This allows users to test-drive the solution and then simply scale with purchase of additional files/capacity and classification policies or work directly with their Microsoft CSP.

IDC source: Unstructured, Undefined, Unknown: What Do You Really Know About Your Data? Doc # DR2020_T5_MM, March 2020.

Resources:
Aparavi Platform: Data Classification Demo, Part 1
Aparavi Platform: Data Classification Demo, Part 2

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