On December 3rd, 2007, ZANTAZ (an Autonomy company) announced "Desktop Legal Hold" a legal hold solution for the preservation of relevant information on desktops and laptops. (see press release for further details)
The integration of ZANTAZ's capabilities, recently acquired by Autonomy, into the core of Autonomy IDOL platform continues, with a "Legal Hold" twist, which takes advantage of the capabilities of the combined Autonomy and ZANTAZ technologies.
As discussed in our Market IQ on Content Security (released in October 2007, freely downloadable), policy-driven (rather than purely "human-driven") security is the key to managing the security of content throughout it's lifecycle.
There has been much buzz about The Long Tail, particularly in the search market, since Chris Anderson wrote the initial article in WIRED, October 2004, and later released the book of the same title. Summary: There is untapped value in the vast amount of information we have available to sell, buy, find, use. That discussion comes primarily from the commerce side of the discussion, and is well worth understanding, from both a Business to Consumer standpoint, and an internally facing Enterprise Search standpoint. For legal/compliance purposes though, it's worth keeping in mind the latent danger (and opportunity) for the vast amount of information floating within an organization.
Hence, the Long Arm. The capabilities of the ZANTAZ Desktop Legal Hold offering are specifically meant to enforce policies out "at the edge" of desktops and laptops, rather than strictly within the safe confines of an Enterprise Content Management or Enterprise Records Management repository.
The agent-based, policy-driven capabilities are specifically tasked with essentially auditing and understanding the content "at rest" on the many devices that make up the desktops/laptops where works in progress, and copies of content (e-mail in particular) live, and can so easily be deleted or hidden.
This solution then has multiple purposes:
To be aware of content, wherever it lives;
To know, when a legal hold event occurs, how to prevent that content from being deleted/tampered with;
To take the manual compliance burden out of the equation (aside from the development/deployment of policies on an administrative level);
and perhaps most importantly, to be able to do this with systems that may frequently be on the road, and not "within the firewall."
This is another step in the evolutionary path that we in AIIM Market Intelligence are tracking, as search and agent-based technology meets enforcement and security technology, rather than e-discovery purely as a "so what DO we have in these haystacks anyway?" Russian Roulette game.
