Managing Structured Data with EncompaaS

Applying Labels and Retention to Structured Business Objects

Structured data in relational databases revolutionized the management of transactional data. Today, large organizations have hundreds and sometimes thousands of databases and associated applications, inevitably modified over time as business requirements evolved.

To make sense of structured data, every organization also uses tools to create easily understandable business objects—a software representation that has a set of attributes and values, operations, and relationships to other business objects, and models business behavior.

Even the simplest enterprise information management system, such as a Sales database, will have 20+ tables coming from more than one database schema or even completely different databases, making the data unintelligible to a business user without advanced information management solutions.

Business objects allow organizations to process, report and present information that answers questions such as:

• Which sales in the last fiscal are now identified as subject to legal hold?
• For two products that were recalled by the distributor, what is our liability and inventory?
• Who are my bottom three sales representatives on performance plans in the current fiscal year?
• How do we discover everything relevant to a legal action regarding service calls?

The Complexity of Structured Data Lifecycle Management

Equally important, these same business objects are subject to information lifecycle management. Organizations must address key challenges:

• How do you apply retention to structured data business objects?
• How do you successfully manage a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) for meeting privacy guidelines?
• How does the organization ensure effective and comprehensive eDiscovery?
• How do you apply a legal hold or other label to guide lifecycle management?

Information lifecycle management is difficult and complex for structured data (compared to unstructured data) because it exists as disparate, related database records, often across multiple systems. Moreover, very few database applications support concepts like retention, legal hold, records classification or disposition.

Initially organizations often react by implementing complex, manual, and overly broad information management practices, which are often at odds with best practices in structured, unstructured and semi-structured data governance. Even though only a handful of records are relevant, for example, the easiest approach for many organizations is to save entire databases and tables.

Similarly, a DSAR might make copies of the sensitive privacy or health data being managed, while a legal hold misses important data because nobody knew it existed.

Limitations of Traditional Information Management Solutions

Historically, enterprise information management has focused on information management via applications. Given multiple applications and/or constantly evolved governance rules, organizations end up continuously updating and testing applications.

Another traditional approach pioneered with unstructured data is to use software applications or agents to provide governance through the capabilities of the source repository. This approach might work for an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system or (with some limitations) a file system but is virtually useless with rows in structured databases.

EncompaaS: A Unified Approach to Structured Data Management

EncompaaS is a state-of-the-art information management platform specifically designed to manage both structured and unstructured data seamlessly. Unlike tradition information management solutions, which rely on application-specific controls, EncompaaS applies a consistent governance framework acorss all data types.

With EncompaaS’ information management software, organizations can manage structured data in place (MIP) and use the same capabilities and tools commonly exploited for unstructured data:

• Enterprise search to locate business objects across disparate sources
• Automated classification using artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Tagging and labelling for governance and compliance
• Retention scheduling to enforce data lifecycle policies
• Legal hold application to protect business-critical records
• Defensible disposal of structured data at the end of its information lifecycle

With EncompaaS, customers can define and create their own business objects based on their unique data and requirements; for example, using the information above, easily understandable Sales business objects are created representing a single order from that customer. 

Business Advantages of the EncompaaS Approach

The EncompaaS approach has significant technical and business advantages over traditional approaches:

• Comprehensive auditing of business objects throughout their information lifecycle.
• No application or user interface changes.
• Protects against inadvertent or malicious data deletion by users or applications.
• Defensibly dispose of structured data at the end of its lifecycle—using the same capabilities used for defensible disposition of unstructured data.
• Defensibly dispose of structured data consistent with enterprise policies, procedures and best practices for deletion from databases.

Information lifecycle management continues to evolve from electronic files in disparate systems to business objects representing structured data from multiple data sources.

EncompaaS’ cloud-native information management software allows organizations to consistently apply their knowledge and existing practices identically to both structured and unstructured data. The result is lower costs, enhanced compliance, reduced risk and greater data quality. 

Most importantly, the EncompaaS solution provides both complete data control while unlocking new value from structured data assets to drive business intelligence and informed decision making.