REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - May 29, 2014) - Actiance, the leader in compliance, security, archiving and eDiscovery for all critical business communications, today announced the general availability of Alcatraz, the first cloud-based, Context-Aware archive for email, social, and other real-time communications. Built on an architecture that is unique within the enterprise information archive market, Alcatraz simplifies governance and reduces the cost of eDiscovery by displaying dynamic content in context.
"At The Florida Bar, all of our email, enterprise social, and public social content currently live in disparate systems. This makes for extremely tedious searches across all of these systems for responses to eDiscovery and Public Records requests," says Jonathon Israel, IT Operations Manager at The Florida Bar. "With Alcatraz's single repository and search and retrieval process, we have the potential to streamline our response process, saving The Florida Bar time and resources. We are very excited for the potential Alcatraz represents."
Designed and developed on patent-pending technology, Alcatraz overcomes the technical challenges of storing and managing complex social and collaborative content -- a struggle for traditional archives. Alcatraz employs an object-based approach to store any type of content, extract rich metadata, and scale with ease. Traditional archives, on the other hand, convert and retain all communications as flat-file emails and are ill-suited to accommodate the interactive, dynamic commenting, replying, editing, and deleting that is characteristic of social content.
"The rising use of social media, unified communication and collaboration tools are well established in today's enterprise. With these rich communication channels come new layers of complexity and risk for organizations that must adhere and comply with ever-changing legal and regulatory requirements," said Sean Pike, Program Director for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and eDiscovery, IDC. "The need for storing, preserving, managing and discovering the growing volumes of social business information based on contextual conversation threads should be a high priority for any organization looking to achieve an effective information governance strategy. Traditional email archiving solutions were not designed to manage conversation threads that span multiple information sources. Solutions such as Actiance's Alcatraz are emerging to address these challenges and enable organizations to have a context-aware archive that embraces the latest corporate communication platforms while reducing management complexity and risk."
"We pioneered real-time governance for new forms of communications including unified communications and social media. Now, by releasing the first Context-Aware archive, we are pioneers again, ushering in a new era of archiving," said Kailash Ambwani, President and CEO of Actiance. "With Alcatraz, Actiance now provides a single governance platform for email, unified communications, collaboration, social media and all other critical business communications across their entire information lifecycle -- from policy control to monitoring to archiving."
Being able to archive at scale is also crucial in managing today's exploding data volume and content types. To architect Alcatraz for cloud-scale, Actiance followed the successful model established by many mega-scale cloud applications, namely, creating a general-purpose object store that is fully indexed, massively parallel across all components, and offers a Google-like search experience.
"We started by using state-of-the-art technologies for each specific task, for example, a distributed database for rapid ingestion of content metadata; a multi-tenant index for fast, scalable searches; and a tamper-proof object store for retention," said John Onusko, Director of Research and Architecture at Actiance. "As a result, Alcatraz has the contextual intelligence to discern and treat each communication channel separately and can scale horizontally to grow with our customers' data needs. Alcatraz also includes plenty of other features - like WORM compliance, to ensure retained content is immutable - to meet the needs of all organizations, especially those that are highly regulated and highly litigious."
As a result of its unique architecture, Alcatraz provides organizations with an archive that simplifies legal reviews and ensures timely responses to discovery requests. For example, investigators can more accurately reconstruct who said what when, including edited or deleted content, using snapshots to jump to any specific point in time to review a conversation.
Alcatraz also features a robust API layer, allowing easy integration with partner solutions to meet an organization's broader eDiscovery and governance needs.
"In light of our customers' evolving data requirements, Recommind is constantly on the lookout for innovative technologies to augment our core Axcelerate platform. Actiance's groundbreaking cloud archive, Alcatraz, together with Axcelerate, provides customers a seamless solution to preserve, collect, and review a breadth of content -- from email to instant messaging to social media content," said Dean Gonsowski, Vice President, Business Development and Head of Global Information Governance at Recommind. "Alcatraz's unique ability to retain and present context for complex business communications further streamlines eDiscovery management for our customers."
"As another leading provider of cloud-based compliance tools, we are excited about working with Actiance to provide the market with a way to control, monitor, and archive all critical business communications in conjunction with the litigation hold process," said Monica Enand, CEO of Zapproved. "Companies are challenged with the increased use of social media and other productivity tools in business settings, and combining Legal Hold Pro with Alcatraz will create a better way for companies to manage their preservation obligations."
Alcatraz pricing starts at $7/user/month for the first channel and $5/user/month for each additional channel. Dedicated cloud and archive migration services are also available.
Additional Information
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About Actiance
Actiance® is a global leader in communication, collaboration, and social media governance for the enterprise. Its governance platform is used by millions of professionals across dozens of industries. With the power of communication, collaboration, and social media at their fingertips, Actiance helps professionals everywhere to engage with customers and colleagues so they can unleash social business. The Actiance platform gives organizations the ability to ensure compliance for all their communications channels. It provides real-time content monitoring, centralized policy management, contextual capture of content and smart archiving which improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of eDiscovery and helps protect users from malware and accidental or malicious leakage of information. Actiance supports all leading social media, unified communications, collaboration, and IM platforms, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), Twitter, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Skype, IBM, (IBM), Jive (JIVE), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Salesforce.com (CRM).
Actiance headquarters are in Redwood City, California. For more information, visit http://www.actiance.com or call 1-888-349-3223.