A Legacy of Compliance Solutions
When speaking about AvePoint’s entry into the compliance space, my colleague and AvePoint Chief Risk and Compliance Officer Dana Simberkoff often says, “AvePoint has been in the compliance business with nearly every product we’ve developed, we just didn’t realize it before!” She is absolutely correct – we had been working with SharePoint customers on archiving, auditing, security management, reporting, eDiscovery, and other compliance challenges over the years. When your teams were implementing a governance policy to respond to ITAR, HIPAA, or SEC compliance, they were likely using our software to build your policies. When your teams were responding to breaches or audits, they were likely using our tools to capture supporting evidence about data that had been identified as valuable to the organization.
Enter AvePoint Compliance Guardian
The fundamental challenge was no longer in automating governance policies, but in knowing what to govern. In 2011, we launched AvePoint Compliance Guardian to help shine light on the dark data in your environment. Customers who long suspected they had valuable intellectual property (IP) sitting in file shares, potential information security leaks in their extranets, or even personally identifiable information (PII) published on a public web app finally had a searchlight to identify these risks before they became public information.
Our conversations with customers certainly began to change. AvePoint Compliance Guardian’s analysis engine established our ability to take those supporting stories of security management and auditing to the content itself, tailoring the right governance policies for the right content. We worked with one U.S.-based organization – which had been fined significantly for having confidential military information accessible to foreign nationals – to proactively monitor data for Export Administration Regulations (EAR) compliance and prevent any new breaches from occurring. Their fines were dramatically reduced for having this level of oversight for their data.
While the intelligence of our products grew as a result of this scanning and classification engine, we learned a few lessons in the process:
- The majority of our customers have an overwhelming amount of risk in their organization that no individual or IT team could manage on their own.
- Most risk and compliance officers don’t have a clear way to identify the areas that represent the greatest risk to the company and process accordingly. Too many teams are still trying to “boil the ocean” when implementing clean-up plans.
- Most privacy officers are able to put together reports about the organization’s risk, but are not enabled with access to the tools and systems they need to actually reduce the risk.
AvePoint Compliance Guardian Today
We knew that we had to respond, and the latest release of AvePoint Compliance Guardian comes directly from those demands. Our new interface features improved ability to:
- Identify and map risk across your organization through a simple to understand risk formula and system-wide heat map
- Automatically assign incidents to data owners to offload the burden of work to those who understand the content best
- Investigate data breaches across multiple systems through a single interface to understand the document history, who has accessed the content, how exposed it was in the source system, and any corrective actions taken by the organization to prevent the breach
- Remediate risk directly from the incident management interface and establish proactive policies to prevent this risk from recurring in the future
We’re making it easier than ever in AvePoint Compliance Guardian to ensure information security across your organization’s IT systems, including:
- SharePoint
- Office 365
- Yammer
- Lync/Skype for Business
- File shares
- Structured databases
- Web sites
- Web systems
Don’t be blindsided or live in fear of your next data breach – contact us today and start scanning! Request a free demo to see for yourself how AvePoint Compliance Guardian can help you better understand your data and start to take action.
