Is Your Content Within Policy? Policy Wrappers Deliver Compliance with Less Cost

Many information professionals tell me that keeping up with regula­tory and corporate policy is an increasingly critical demand for their business. Managing large volumes of content in multiple formats complicates these regulations further. However, compliance and governance don’t have to be your greatest pain points.

Most companies find, however, that traditional approaches—often manually executed tactics—are expensive, inconsistent, and time-consuming. The challenges of hand tagging content must be weighed against regulatory penalties and system replacement. In this brief article, I’ll offer a better way. A content solution built with policy management as the foundation can deliver automation capabilities for regulation compliance, allowing employees to focus on business success rather than regulatory demands.

Emerging Content Challenges – Local and Abroad

Manually attaching policy tags, for policies like retention or redaction onto existing content is simply inefficient in today’s business environment. Every day 4.6 billion pieces of content flood businesses across the globe.¹ Managing, retrieving, delivering, storing, and archiving this content has proven increasingly complex. Businesses in every industry vertical need a content platform capable of responding to emerging challenges.

Many industries, particularly financial and healthcare, face additional regulatory challenges. Daily operations are further complicated by regulations like the HIPPA Act or the Dodd-Frank Act, which can inflict heavy penalties as a cost of noncompliance. Most companies with global reach are aware of the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This sweeping regulation increases citizens’ (your customers’) control of the information they share and harmonizes the EU’s current data protection regulations. While GDPR makes it easier for non-European companies to comply with these customer data protection standards, the compliance expectation carries severe penalties for overexposure of customer information—as much as 4% of annual worldwide turnover or $21.5 million.

Approaching Content Management with Policies First

In the late 1990’s, Enterprise Content Management companies (ECMs) began addressing corporate standards and industry regulations by layering in policy based management administrative tools. While this policy layer approach has helped to address some of the issues discussed above, the resulting ECM became monolithic and cumbersome for enterprises of any substantial size. With the flood of information inherent in today’s business environment, inefficient processes and clunky systems cause difficult setbacks downstream.

Rather than treating standards and regulations as an afterthought, ASG Technologies advocates a policy driven foundation for the content platform. In this way, every piece of content and critical information is wrapped in policy from the moment of ingestion. With more efficient policy wrappers in place, your content flows smoothly through every business process. More importantly, regulatory standards and requirements can be applied from the onset of content at a granular level, making compliance a much simpler task.

This smarter approach to content management and governance applies policy wrappers to content as it is ingested or indexed into the system. This places your content management needs on a service level, enabling retrieval, management, storage, user, and reporting services for your needs.

Policy Wrapped Content Solutions Provide:

• Information delivery: Get vital content into the right hands by identifying the value and business context of information across ?the enterprise, while recognizing the ?compliance status of information to determine risk and gaps.
• Retention and archival enforcement policy: Categorize and apply policy to content ?in enterprise repositories to ensure compliant lifetime management.
• Redaction: Protect sensitive information from unauthorized exposure and achieve regulatory compliance with automated, rules-based full and partial redaction capabilities.

Evolving the Content Strategy for Every Business

As outlined previously, policy wrappers can improve your compliance efforts, but the story doesn’t end there. Content solutions with a policy driven architecture, such as ASG’s Mobius, bring numerous advantages to any content strategy. Businesses can physically deploy a content solution in any environment. While on-premise deployment behind a firewall remains the most prevalent ECM environment, you can now leverage public and private cloud services including Amazon Web Services with full AWS console integration and container support. More excitingly, well-architected content solutions support hybrid environments that combine the security of on-premise with the flexibility of cloud. No matter your environment, you’ll enjoy easy integration with every content source; whether scanners, print streams, desktop applications, or any other business process that generates content that needs to be managed and made accessible to employees and external customers. You’ll also enjoy the consistency of a single location platform. This more flexible architecture integrates with your legacy systems to extend their capabilities from a single access point. One location to set all rules on all forms of content to govern access, delivery, and storage throughout the business lifecycle.

Achieve Compliance without Increased Time or Cost

With a policy based content solution you can seamlessly integrate regulatory compliance into your long-term storage and archiving with complete records management functionality. The flexible ASG architecture also integrates and supports your other content repository or file shares, delivering a complete content solution with a single interface. Granular policy management includes sharing and viewing policies driven by mobile responsiveness, secured viewing, and redaction. Secure presentation of sensitive content (documents, images, reports and so on) happens automatically. Meet compliance needs with minimal cost using Mobius’ native redaction solution. 

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ASG Technologies brings peace of mind to every enterprise with information access, management, and control within leg­acy and leading-edge environments. ASG Content Solutions work with your existing IT environments and business pro­cesses, so you don’t have to throw out decades of investment to make room.

¹ LinkedIn, 2015. “Why We’re Hungry for Remarkable Content.”

Is Your Content Within Policy? Policy Wrappers Deliver Compliance With Less Cost