A bit of history: AvePoint, as many of you know, started out as a backup company, one of the first tools supporting backup and granular recovery of SharePoint 2001 content. Now, if you’ve paid attention to the title of this blog, you may be thinking: What does backup have to do with compliance? In order to address this properly, we need to think about the purpose of backup. In a nutshell, it’s insurance. If something goes wrong, we have a fall back plan – a previous point in time to which we can revert. Why do we need this? For example, imagine a document gets accidentally deleted or corrupted, and the content owner requires that document “ASAP” for that really important “thing”. Having a backup allows us to keep that content available, or at least easily accessible, for that end user so they can continue work. Backup tools, especially like those offered by AvePoint, drastically simplify the restore methodology so this content remains available and accessible for that end user in need. Backup also helps us establish recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs), so we can more easily satisfy organizational SLAs and remain compliant with our own operational governance policies. So, even a capability as seemingly simple as backup can make a big impact when we’re challenged with keeping content available for those that need it (a major theme that underpins most compliance initiatives), as well as complying with internal protocols (in this case, for operational governance).
Moving on, DocAve 4.5 was released in early 2008. In that version of our flagship software platform, we not only updated existing products, but we also added new ones to help our customers address specific compliance concerns around auditing and content retention. DocAve Auditor provided insight into ‘who accessed what when and where, how they got that access’, and Compliance Archiver gave organizations a historical point-in-time look at the state of their SharePoint environments with immutable snapshots.
Fast forward to mid-2009: DocAve 5 had been publically available for about a year, and the next major update, 5.2, was just around the corner. This update also included eDiscovery, allowing organizations to browse SharePoint content and place items on Legal Hold in response to litigation requests. But these solutions to monitor compliance and respond to litigation requests, however quickly, were still reactive compliance solutions. After working with several customers, AvePoint developed a solution that helped our customers better proactively address compliance concerns with DocAve Content Shield, which blocked or quarantined inappropriate content as it entered SharePoint or that was identified during a scheduled scan. With this product, organizations could input dictionaries of terms to scan against, so we could help address regulatory or internal protocols and guidelines for which content was SharePoint-appropriate. This name, ‘Content Shield’ – did just what it implied: served as a first-level protection layer for SharePoint against private or otherwise inappropriate content entering SharePoint.
Since then, advancements in Content Shield have been made to improve how we scan content as well as what actions we can take once content is identified, including simply tagging content with a piece of metadata or content type. Recently, Content Shield even won an award.
Now, more than 10 years after our initial product offering to support content availability and compliance with internal protocols, AvePoint makes another giant leap with the next evolution of Content Shield, which we’ve decided to rebrand as Compliance Guardian. This new iteration takes our experience over the past 10 years and delivers truly comprehensive capabilities to organizations utilizing not only SharePoint, but other content management solutions as well.
Why the name change?
We’re taking the best of Content Shield and evolving it into a holistic compliance platform so that we continue to lead innovation like we do in governance and administration. We’ve broadened the capabilities of our toolset, and here at AvePoint, we felt a name change would best reflect this as compared to a simple ‘v3’. With Compliance Guardian, we’re really getting to heart of what this product is capable of-First, addressing compliance concerns – whether we’re talking about compliance with industry or government regulations, with internal protocols, or even brand management. Next,, if you think about the purpose of a guard – whether you imagine the Queen’s Guard of the British Army, a medieval knight, or the security guard at your building’s entrance – the purpose is two-fold: Allow through the gates or doors those who belong, who’ve shown proper identification, or have been invited behind the protective walls, and to keep out persons that don’t belong. So here, we capture the main purpose of Compliance Guardian: To keep your enterprise environments available and accessible to people who need it, and protected from those who don’t.
Compliance Guardian represents an exciting step in AvePoint’s journey to support your organization’s compliance initiatives. We hope you’ll give us the opportunity to showcase exactly how powerful this product, especially as part of AvePoint Compliance Solutions, can truly bolster your organizations’ compliance and help you establish an effective risk management lifecycle.
To read more about Compliance Guardian, please visit our website. Please take some time to also read up on AvePoint Compliance Solutions to learn how AvePoint can help you address a variety of regulations and internal protocols.
As always, we look forward to your feedback, as we strive to continuously deliver best-of-breed products to our customers!
