Actiance Reinvents Enterprise Information Archiving With the First Context-Aware, Cloud Archive for All Communications

Introducing Alcatraz, a Single Repository for Email, Social and Real-Time Communications Designed to Reduce the Cost of eDiscovery and Governance


REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 27, 2014) - Actiance, helping organizations benefit from communications, collaboration, and social networking, today announced the launch of Alcatraz, an innovative, cloud-based archive that combines a focus on context with the traditional requirements of an email archive. Actiance reduces risk and cost across the full information lifecycle of today's dynamic communications channels, from policy control and real time content monitoring to legal holds and records retention and disposal.

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

Actiance has built upon its social governance vision -- expanding on its Vantage and Socialite cloud solutions -- and now sets a new 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. Alcatraz takes a completely 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, faster, and more cost-effective for auditors, attorneys, and litigation support staff to find and assess content with greater accuracy and confidence, 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 Vice President, 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, Actiance provides many unique capabilities that are critical to any 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%.1
  • Recording of edits and deletes: Edited or deleted content is captured with all relevant metadata, providing a more accurate reconstruction of who said what when.
  • Open platform APIs: Alcatraz facilitates ingestion of data from custom applications or third parties, forming a single repository upon which to conduct more efficient eDiscovery.
  • Integration with award-winning Actiance Vantage and Socialite: Integration provides seamless management of content from creation to disposal, facilitating more effective 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 of 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 today, with general availability in Q2 2014.

Additional Information

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.

1 "Where the Money Goes: Understanding Litigant Expenditures for Producing Electronic Discovery," RAND Institute for Civil Justice, 2012.