Information Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)

Regulatory compliance

Every company must adhere to a myriad of laws and regulations as part of their day-to-day operations. Many companies, however, are not adequately equipped to track potential risks, violations, and bad actors across their entire organization, in real-time. Rational Governance can proactively and defensibly avoid compliance violations by being trained to recognize potentially problematic communications and behavior, and then alert administrators should they be detected. RG also enables immediate and targeted searching, analytics, machine learning, and iterative exploration across unstructured electronic documents from a central interface, should a regulator issue a request for documents. Take control of your information – your reputation depends on it.

Data privacy protection

Whether your company is subject to GDPR, CCPA, SHIELD Act, PIPEDA, or a combination thereof, not doing enough to ensure data privacy could be a costly mistake. It’s not enough to write procedures for proper use of private information; you must actually enforce them across data “in-the-wild.” Rational Governance is the ideal GRC tool to document your Personal Data (PD) as an ongoing business function, as it tracks and controls every document within an organization from the moment of creation. The automated document actions empower privacy professionals to enforce retention, controls the flow of data, notify admins on lapses in compliance, and quickly respond to requests from individuals and regulatory authorities.

Records & Information Management (RIM)

Gathering regulatory intelligence and analyzing business processes to build out an informed retention schedule can be a tremendous task. Not to mention maintaining data according to those policies, which is nearly impossible, as typical solutions rely on input from employees. That’s why Rational Governance is the perfect RIM solution. RG can automatically recognize data fitting into the most complex categories and specify exactly what should happen to those records, in a consistent, documented, and highly defensible way, all while taking the onus of classifying documents into policies off of employees. Don’t spend the effort on defining how your electronic data should be managed without empowering the organization to actually do it.

Enhancing Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

The problem with most ECM systems is that they require employees to save or move documents to the appropriate folder locations for the designated policies to be enforced. Of course, employees rarely perform such a task correctly, if they undertake it at all. Rational Governance is able to enhance the utility of ECMs through tight integration – by first identifying and classifying records in-place, and then automatically moving those records from disparate data sources into their correct folder locations in an ECM for long-term records management.

Supply chain data governance

Many large industrial organizations have been held to account for the activities of their suppliers, and all have valuable information assets residing with those external parties. To ensure that GRC and data governance policies of suppliers are in compliance with your own, and to help maintain the security of sensitive information residing outside the direct control of your organization, push RG adoption down the supply chain to enforce data governance wherever important information resides.

“Rational Governance is a key element to helping us achieve our information management goals. With tools for data mapping, search, auto-classification, and policy enforcement, RG has dramatically improved our process for identifying and retaining records.”

Data Discovery

eDiscovery response and Early Case Assessment (ECA)

When a litigation arises, an organization can use Rational Governance for immediate case assessment and data discovery. Documents residing anywhere in the enterprise can be centrally searched and analyzed at the source, enabling you to quickly, easily, and accurately assess the scope of the discovery matter at hand, determine your organization’s exposure, and develop the proper legal strategy as early as possible. This immediate case assessment capability will help your organization dramatically reduce litigation costs by increasing in-house efficiency and reducing the number of documents slated for outside review – thereby improving the quality and speed of work done by outside counsel and consultants.

Legal Hold and Notifications

RG users can instantly find and preserve documents that may be relevant to a litigation across multiple data sources, without the need to collect data or utilize an outside vendor. These in-place holds completely eliminate the risk of data spoliation, and Evergreen Preservations ensure that any new documents matching preservation requirements will be automatically held in place on an ongoing basis. Holds can be expanded or released based on the scope of the matter, and override all other retention policies so that relevant documents are not inadvertently destroyed. Holds do not rely on employee input and do not require the data to be removed from behind your firewall.

Organizations can meet the legal requirements of notifying potential custodians of their preservation obligations via RG’s notification tool, which integrates with LDAP to email hold notices and monitor compliance. Leverage message templates to ensure consistency and maximize efficiency, configure automated reminders and escalations to enforce continued compliance, track acknowledgments to establish accountability and defensibility, and attach surveys to uncover new areas of focus that may be helpful to data discovery.

Collection

RG allows for search, analysis, and legal hold to be applied pre-collection. RG can then be leveraged for targeted collection – verified by MD5 and SHA-1 hash – from any managed data source into RR or any other review repository. Collections can be a subset, exact match, or superset of documents previously preserved. The separation of Preservation and Collection is a powerful tool to ensure that all potentially relevant data is preserved, while only truly responsive data is collected – thereby reducing the number of documents passed downstream to litigation review. This process not only saves significant review and processing time and costs, but also minimizes data security risk by reducing the number of documents transferred outside the organization’s native security environment.

Open Records request response

It is not a new problem: information is growing exponentially, deadlines for responses are getting shorter, and the volume of requests are exploding. When a request comes in, Rational Governance provides governmental organizations a practical way to data discovery. Locate responsive records across unstructured data sources, protecting sensitive, classified, and personal information every step of the way. Combined with Rational Review, you can triage, redact, and produce the records in virtually any relevant format. Stop wasting time performing these tasks manually and eliminate your request queue today.

Internal Investigations

Due to cost and time constraints, many firms must be selective about what matters they investigate internally. Rational Governance removes any cost barrier, as data can be analyzed in-place and in-house, without incurring additional fees or involving outside vendors. You won’t even need to utilize internal IT resources to search and collect data.

Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs)

Rational Governance can help automate the process of responding to data subject access requests without the need to outsource. When a request comes in, utilize Rational Governance to locate responsive data across unstructured data sources. Collect data directly into Rational Review for further culling, analysis, redaction, and production in virtually any format.

Races for Leniency

In antitrust and competition investigations, time is not on your side. Avoid harsh penalties like fines, criminal conviction, and prison sentences by utilizing Rational Governance in races for leniency. As soon as you become aware of potential wrongdoing, immediately begin searching across enterprise data and analyzing documents. Establish whether you have an issue, turn over relevant information, and apply for leniency from a regulator within a matter of days, well before other parties have even completed data collection.

Second Requests (US), Supplemental Information Request (Canada) and Phase II (European Union)

These types of information request can be costly and onerous, and provide little time for companies to respond. There is a lot at stake for companies pursuing a merger or acquisition and it’s vital that any further request for information from a regulator can be met quickly and accurately and presented logically.

Rational Governance allows organizations to instantly interrogate their data universe for any information pertaining to a regulator’s request and provide a defensible and audited log of how that information was collated. The disruption, drain of internal resources, and significant costs typically incurred can be significantly minimized by utilizing a system like Rational Governance.

Information Security

You can’t protect what you don’t know you have. Before working on your information security model, deciding on procedures, or even finalizing your technology stack, you need to know what you have, and where your business needs it to be. Rational Governance has the most comprehensive set of identification capabilities for recognizing sensitive corporate information the moment it’s created. Even better, reduce the risk of harmful data breaches by writing automatic rules for proactively moving sensitive information out of high-risk areas (e.g., laptops) and into more secure locations.

Post-breach remediation

When a security breach occurs, RG gives lighting fast insight into your exposure and what data elements – such as sensitive corporate information or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – may have been compromised through an encrypted, independent index.

Smarter data loss prevention

Does your company use a DLP Data Loss Protection (DLP) tool to prevent sensitive information from leaving the enterprise? Rational Governance can enhance the usefulness of your DLP tool by identifying and tagging sensitive information. Your DLP tool can then leverage these document tags to take smarter actions on documents in transit.

Knowledge Resiliency

Data has the unfortunate possibility of being stolen, lost, or misplaced during a breach. Businesses that do not have visibility into their data nor measures in place to retrieve severed data can suffer tremendous losses to enterprise knowledge as a result of a breach. Rational Governance helps to solve this problem and preserve critical enterprise knowledge by taking a lightweight index of all text and metadata in managed data stores. This lightweight index can be used to interrogate missing data (or even as the foundation for reconstituting it, albeit with limitations) so that the organization can make informed decisions and recover quickly following a breach.

Storage Optimization

Legacy Data Cleanup

Many companies have accumulated vast stores of unorganized, poorly understood, and rarely accessed documents that serve little or no business value. So how do you decide where to get started? High-level metadata reporting and keyword searching can be helpful, but it’s never enough when the time comes to press delete.

The best cure for fear and uncertainty is true insight into your data. Rational Governance can help you understand what you have, identify what needs to be retained, and destroy the balance. Not only will you enhance storage optimization and save on hard costs, but you will reduce risk and cost down the road. Every record that is defensibly deleted is a record that won’t come back to haunt you, as deleted data can’t be subject to future eDiscovery and regulatory document requests, nor involved in data breach response and remediation.

Data Migration

Rational Governance can assist in porting your data from on-premises legacy systems to new cloud applications, while simultaneously performing data remediation, storage optimization, and maintaining your information governance policies.

Business Intelligence

Knowledge Management

Rational Governance provides a uniquely clear window into the full breadth and depth of content across the enterprise. The result is unparalleled visibility into the work, expertise, and knowledge of all staff and the implicit business intelligence, processes, and decision-making employed across the organization. With that vision, Rational Governance’s automated policies can ensure information assets are where they need to be, when they need to be, every time.

Big Data Analytics

The explosion of data created by and available to the enterprise presents an unprecedented opportunity for new insights into the business environment, the mind of the customer, and the operations of the organization. The predictive modeling tools integrated into Rational Governance enable the analysis of potentially millions of variables to discover key components and relationships driving complex systems and behaviors.

Rational Governance can customize the algorithms at its disposal to answer any number of important business intelligence questions and help organizations gain insights into how to enhance value, such as:

Market analysis
Customer and competitor profiling
Behavioral analysis
Staffing
Company culture
Employee satisfaction and productivity
Performance management
Implicit and explicit decision-making

Improving third-party analytics engines

Does your enterprise already have a proprietary or third-party analytics engine for big data analytics? No problem. Use RG to extract the text and metadata from unstructured content and plug in your analytics engine through our API. Accessing unstructured content has never been so easy.