*This partner spotlight was completed by Analisa Scott, Business Development Representative with Active Navigation

Company name: Active Navigation

Location: (Global) Reston, VA; Winchester, United Kington; Melbourne, Australia

Tell us about your company – who are you and what do you do?

Used globally by both governments and businesses, our leading file analysis platform analyzes, cleans and classifies unstructured information. Active Navigation enables organizations to meet their information governance goals with solutions that proactively and intelligently take control of and rationalize their unstructured information assets.

I am responsible for managing and maintaining our portfolio of strategic partners across North America that enhance our product offering to fit our prospective and current client’s needs.

How long they have been a SeeUnity Partner:

Active Navigation and SeeUnity launched a formal partnership in 2015.

Company bio: 3-4 sentences about the partner, what SeeUnity products do they use?

Active Navigation proudly partners with SeeUnity to provide additional reach to our product offering by being able to connect to a diverse collection of repositories. Our file analysis tool, Discovery Center, can be extended to connect to File Share, SharePoint, Exchange, G Suite, Content Server, Documentum etc. using both our proprietary connectors and those engineered by SeeUnity.

What are your top 3 focuses for the next year?

Active Navigation’s Discovery Center platform is being utilized by clients across the globe to identify, clean and classify their information estate. Outside of the unnecessary costs and significant security risks associated with unstructured data, non-compliance with data regulations is a leading use-case for organizations seeking to leverage file analysis technologies. For the next year, Active Navigation plans to address these issues, and help clients…

1. Comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, by identifying, flagging and remediating all information containing personal data that is subject to regulation
2. Comply with the NYS Cybersecurity regulations by identifying, flagging and remediating employee and customer PII
3. Helping end one of the root hinderances to pragmatic information governance: analyzing, cleaning and migrating away from unstructured and ungoverned data repositories such as file shares.

How do you work with SeeUnity?

Our Connector Framework allows any potential information source to be analyzed and the resulting basic file properties and calculated metadata mapped into a single metadata schema. In our partnership with SeeUnity, we provide OEM integration with a wide range of additional repositories. This integration is seamless from the user’s perspective and supports the full range of Discovery Center capabilities through SeeUnity interfaces shipped under license.

What are key benefits you see the partnership between SeeUnity and your organization?

The ability to analyze unstructured data at scale in a variety of different repositories enables organizations to identify what data has business value, and what does not. This process is critical to establishing an information governance program for any organization, thereby eliminating data risk and facilitating enterprise-level regulatory compliance. By leveraging SeeUnity and Active Navigation in parallel, an organization’s entire information estate is within the scope of a data discovery, cleaning, and classification program.

What are the key factors in making a partnership successful?

For a partnership to thrive, both parties must be equally invested in providing the best end-result solution to the client. We view our partners to be an extension of our core business, so a key to success with them is to make sure we align with business values. Information governance isn’t simply an approach to information management, but rather a necessity for the protection and securement of the information pertinent to individuals. In the age of Big Data, big and comprehensive solutions are necessary to deliver solutions capable of securing information at scale. A successful partnership is dependent on the mutual understanding of these issues, the sensitivity of data governance projects, and a shared responsibility to deliver results that can translate into risks averted.

These types of relationships cannot be made overnight, and we are dedicated to building a strong foundation with our partners to be successful in the long run. This is the approach we took with SeeUnity, and are now enjoying the benefits of an effective and mutual partnership to deliver results to organizations throughout the world.

What are some of the biggest challenges your customers are faced with? How do you guys address them?

Our clients are often faced with a barrage of issues pertaining to their unstructured data. Their inability to identify and locate data pertinent to a request for information, the fears of data breaches or leaks, and even the likelihood of non-compliance with data regulations such as GDPR.

Active Navigation’s approach to all of these issues is to first discover and identify what information exists within client information estates, clean them of eTrash and clutter, and classify what remains. These capabilities allow clients to fundamentally grasp what information should be remediated, and help them to define where their information risk derives from.

What are the most interesting topics or trends you’re seeing within the industry?

Over the past 5 years, the records and information management market has been evolving drastically. The “keep everything forever” mentality, that arose from the advent of Cloud storage and electronic content management systems, is being eroded by the argument in favor of proactive information governance. Today, in an effort to avoid costs from eDiscovery to fines from regulatory non-compliance and to minimize the risk of sensitive information leakage, organizations are now considering data discovery and cleaning a priority.

While GDPR and other regulations are just about to start triggering non-compliance fines, the arguments in favor of implementing file analysis for information governance predated these and will continue to persuade organizations to act proactively with their data, rather than reactively.

Some optional questions:

Favorite food?

Sweetgreen

Beer or wine?

Red Wine… Malbec

Music preference?

Country

Favorite sports team?

Hershey Bears/ Washington Capitals

To learn more about Active Navigation, visit their website.