Autonomy Adds Context, Meaning to Data Governance, Policy Management

By David Roe (@druadh20)   Oct 18, 2011   

With Autonomy now officially owned by HP, it is worth keeping an eye on to see where it goes and what it’s doing. While it’s too early to make anything of any changes, the release this week of Policy Authority would suggest that, at least for Autonomy, it's business as usual.

Policy Authority, like other Autonomy products in the GRC space is built on top of IDOL, Autonomy’s server, which can search for a provide context to different kinds of data stored on it.

Policy Management

There is little enough about this new release — it hasn’t even appeared on the Autonomy website yet — to go into it in any great detail, but generally speaking, it enables enterprises to centralize the management of policies across the organizations.

Pretty much what all policy management offerings do, you say, but this one is slightly different in that, based on IDOL, it can provide context to GRC, and can apply consistent policies to all applications like records management systems or legal holds.

It can also do this for content repositories and, even better, can do it for both structured and unstructured data.

For the majority of enterprises, policy management can be a real nightmare. In the majority of cases, it involves taking all the applications in use across the enterprise and coordinating these to create one consistent, corporate-wide policy — and without taking into the account the ongoing addition of content into repositories, any one of which can force a rethink of the whole policy structure and force changes that require a back-to the-beginning approach.

Contextual Policies

If that data can be put in context, then the addition of new data can be made a lot easier without having to change entire policies, and that’s where Autonomy comes in.

Autonomy’s Policy Authority can understand the meaning in the different information entering into the system and, using a central meaning-based policy engine to provide a consistent set of rules to subscribed applications, it can automate the steps in the control procedure, making the policies independent of any single policy.

And the best part is that it recognizes context and concepts in data, including social media, web pages, video and audio recordings.

Just released this week at the ARMA International Conference and Expo, Policy Authority is available globally now. 

via cmswire.com