Infrastructure-agnostic, DoD-certified tools aim to streamline deployment of compliance, e-discovery policies.CA is moving into the information governance business that so far has been dominated by the likes of Symantec, EMC and Zantaz.
CAs new Information Governance package, announced Oct. 8 and assembled with products from two recent acquisitions and an OEM partner, is designed to handle a companys compliance, legal and business requirements by providing secure access to information across multivendor environments, Kristi Perdue, director product marketing for CAs Information Governance Solution unit, told eWEEK.
This is done without having to modify or replace existing repositories or business processes, Perdue said.
"The risks that are associated with all this governance include compliance issues, privacy, [litigation] discovery—wherever the information is located, across the globe—and what they are trying to do with this information, whether its simply for making a business decision or if theyre trying to align those daily business needs with corporate obligations that they may be facing," she said.
Data governance tools comprise a central controls library for indexing information, systems testing capabilities, e-mail archiving, paper records management, an automated audit trail generator and reporting features.
Among the regulations these packages cover are the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; Canadas Bill 198; the U.K.s Combined Code and Turnbull report and the Companies Bill; Frances Loi de Securite Financiere; Germanys KonTraG-Law for Control & Transparency and the German Code of Corporate Governance; and the European Unions Proposed Directive on Statutory Audit.
A large number of companies cant effectively manage, control and discover information because it is often dispersed across a wide range of systems and locations, including document management systems, collaboration systems, e-mail archives, and physical documents. In some cases, such as litigation-related discovery, inadequate responses to information requests carry significant business risk, Perdue said.
She said CAs Information Governance offers infrastructure-agnostic, "in-place" records management and enterprise discovery, as well as a broad range of prepackaged and Department of Defense 5015.2-certified integrations with other repositories.
This enables customers to manage e-mail archive content in accordance with corporate retention policies, to consistently apply policy and controls to all content, and to classify content based on its business value—regardless of where it resides, she said.
CA, of Islandia, N.Y., is leveraging technology and expertise from recently acquired iLumin and MDY to deliver these new governance tools.
"CA has had the parts to this solution for about a year and half," Brian Babineau, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, told eWEEK. "They have federated the business group there, and they had taken some knocks in the past for the problems they had in bringing new acquisitions into the company, doing the integration, and getting new products to market. But, of course, thats hard for any company to do."
Babineau said the automatic set-and-control, policy-driven e-mail archiving tool is impressive. "It now has the same interface, the look and feel, of CAs Message Manager, and thats good for the users," he said.
CA Information Governance includes: centralized policy management for controlling physical, electronic and e-mail records; comprehensive e-mail management, consisting of integrated records management, mailbox management, e-discovery and supervision capabilities; and automated data discovery, classification and management across heterogeneous storage environments.
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