If a company receives a request for information pursuant to Article 15 of the GDPR, it must respond quickly. What they often underestimate is how important it is for data to be quickly and fully retrievable. This is because the data usually isn’t just saved in structured databases, but also in unstructured form on file servers and in emails, text files, spreadsheets, or other documents. Enterprise search software enables users to find all of the data they are looking for, both in structured and unstructured form, from a variety of sources. But this is only possible if the data is of the right quality. After all, technically speaking, the software not only searches through the full text of documents, but also their metadata. This refers to additional information about the data, such as name of the author, the document type, etc., but also subject-related metadata. In reality, however, metadata is unfortunately often incomplete because it wasn’t maintained by the document’s creator. State-of-the-art enterprise search software is able to automatically add new, missing metadata and thus significantly improve the quality of the data.
Find and classify data with intelligent software
Using intelligent AI processes, the software automatically enriches existing data with relevant metadata and classifies it into predefined subject areas, for example. This enables companies to seamlessly analyze the content of their documents according to desired or legally required criteria. This serves a variety of purposes – companies can use it not only to track down personal data in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR, but also data that is confidential and must not be disclosed to the outside world, or data that is required in order to comply with export control regulations. In this context, the software can automatically add metadata to hundreds of millions or even billions of documents without any problems. As such, large companies with huge and heterogeneous quantities of data particularly stand to benefit from the capabilities of intelligent software that delivers fast and reliable results.
With reasonable effort, companies can avoid scenarios in which they would lose money or have to pay penalties simply because they lack visibility into their data. This is because such software really comes into its own when it is used in compliance-related scenarios within the company.
Compliance and more – How companies benefit from the use of enterprise search software
Comply with privacy/data protection laws: Companies gain an overview of where their information is located that is relevant to data protection, such as personal data as defined by the GDPR. Employees can locate it quickly and reliably when a request for information needs to be answered or certain personal data needs to be deleted.
Protect intellectual property: Organizations can quickly locate valuable content such as patents, inventions, and other intellectual property owned by the company and comprehensively protect it from unauthorized access using appropriate security policies.
Fulfill confidentiality requirements: The same applies to content that is subject to statutory confidentiality regulations, that is subject to internal security classifications, or that may only be made accessible to certain groups of people due to its confidential nature.
Comply with export control regulations: Exporting companies can operate a secure export control system. They know where each individual piece of information is saved and to whom it may be disclosed.
Companies should ask themselves how well they know their data in order to be prepared for such scenarios. Enterprise search provides a central infrastructure for state-of-the-art information delivery that is deeply integrated into a wide range of business processes. Many of our customers are already taking advantage of these benefits and use the iFinder solution to efficiently and reliably manage their data by intelligently enhancing it through the AI-driven addition of content.
