Enterprise Search: The Foundation for Risk Management

By Laurent Simoneau, CEO, Coveo Solutions, Inc.

When they face regulatory compliance penalties, legal troubles, or a corporate scandal. Today, there is no question that managing security risks and complying with government regulations related to information security can be a daunting task for any organization. In fact, many enterprises now have a mandate to implement technologies and applications that ensure all employees, not just corporate management, can access appropriate information securely.

Having a comprehensive, highly secure enterprise search capability — one that fills the gap between specialized search systems and web-focused search tools — can be a key business asset, and is essential to effective knowledge management for corporations and government entities. When enterprise search has a strong emphasis on knowledge management, intellectual property, e-discovery, and compliance, it becomes the foundation for comprehensive risk management.

Whether it is to meet regulatory compliance requirements from Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or to respond faster to e-discovery requests, companies of all sizes today need to be able to search through literally gigabytes and terabytes of stored data wherever it resides. In other words, companies have to find what they are looking for, every time, all the time — their future may depend on it.

The Role of Search in Litigation

In today’s litigious world, companies must respond not just quickly, but quickly enough to litigation requests for electronic evidence — or face heavy court-imposed sanctions. The problem? eDiscovery is literally like finding a needle in a haystack.

ProSearch Strategies, a discovery, analytics and workplace tools company focused on the legal market in areas of litigation, due diligence, and compliance, faces these issues every day. During its due diligence process, it follows a highly accurate automated process to minimize the manual review of documents — which is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. For a recent case, ProSearch had to search through some 27 terabytes of unstructured data and needed an accurate technology solution that would enable it to hone in the right data, quickly. ProSearch Strategies settled on a combination of applications including Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Business Analytics and Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) for back-end processing on the data. CES is the foundation application that allows ProSearch Strategies to access volumes of information in a manageable, structured format.

“We’re using software-as-a-service and SharePoint as the secure portal structure on the front-end, and SQL business analytics and Coveo for back-end processing on the data. This solution has enabled analysts to consolidate and eliminate time-consuming analytic tasks, decreasing processing time by 30 percent, and allowed researcher-reviewers to make more document decisions per hour, while maintaining the ease of use for casual searchers,” says Trevor Allen, CIO of ProSearch Strategies.

The Role of Search in Compliance

Enterprise search also plays a key role in meeting compliance requirements, and streamlining the audit process to support SOX and HIPAA. For the California Conservation and Liquidation Office (CLO), a division of the California Department of Insurance responsible for regulating all insurance companies operating in California, that compliance task requires managing insolvency, asset distribution, claimant lawsuits, and disbursements. The office also has to routinely determine if an insurance company can be rehabilitated and continue its operations. This requires the CLO to keep extensive forms, policies, and change control documentation on an intranet available to both employees and state auditors. And to ensure compliance, it must keep all processes and change controls current, and make sure each step in any procedure is well documented and implemented without deviation.

According to CLO’s Mohammed Mojabi, IT Networks Operations Manager,” “As a highly regulated entity, we are in a constant state of audit so we needed a search engine that was highly secure, highly accurate, yet easy to use for both users and auditors. Coveo Enterprise Search (CES) is very straight forward, easy to implement, and gets the job done.”

With CES, users and auditors quickly find current forms and documented procedures, reducing the time it takes to find and act on information by up to 35 percent. In addition to the time and money saved, CLO minimizes compliance violations and results in far more efficient audits.

Laurent Simoneau has more than a decade of experience developing and bringing to market innovative search products. He comes to Coveo from Copernic, where he was the Chief Operating Officer and responsible for orchestrating the company's enterprise products division spin-off into Coveo. Prior to being COO, Laurent served as CTO of Copernic for 6 years, during which he guided product strategy and directed the research and development of core technologies. Laurent holds an MBA from Université du Quebec.

About Coveo Solutions Inc.

Coveo Enterprise Search delivers secure, unified search across all structured and unstructured information located in email systems, file systems, databases, intranets, portals, extranets, and web sites. Coveo Enterprise Search delivers the best value in the marketplace with an award winning combination of out-of-the-box document level security, consumer style ease of use, unparalleled accuracy based on real-time file monitoring, concept extraction and summarization, fast deployment and minimal administration. Coveo’s enterprise clients include AAA, AMN Healthcare, ESPN, International Paper, Hewlett Packard, Lockheed Martin, NATO, NASA, AC Nielsen, Nutreco, and Verizon.

Contact Coveo at www.coveo.com or 800-635-5476.

“As a highly regulated entity, we are in a constant state of audit so we needed a search engine that was highly secure, highly accurate, yet easy to use for both users and auditors.” — Mohammed Mojabi of the California Conservation and Liquidation Office.