FAQ
- What is Liability Prevention?
- Does my company need to consider communications Liability Prevention?
- What are the risks of non-compliance?
- How does ALPs improve transparency?
- How does ALPs work?
- What are the resource requirements associated with employing ALPs? Will I need to hire additional staff?
- With which corporate e-mail platforms, servers, and configurations is ALPs compatible?
- With which Document Management and Records Management systems is ALPs compatible?
- How will ALPs affect my internal workflow?
- How difficult is ALPs to implement? What about my subsidiaries and geographically distributed organization?
- What kind of performance can I expect by incorporating ALPs as my Liability Prevention solution?
- Is ALPs scalable?
- What types of storage media does ALPs work with?
- 1. What is Liability Prevention?
The tide of regulatory measures in recent years has changed the degree of control enterprises must maintain over their incoming and outgoing data. Not only are businesses today facing stricter enforcement of existing regulatory provisions for data retention, they are also struggling to meet the challenge of putting in place an e-mail records management system that will meet the compliance criteria of tomorrow.
Non-compliance is not the only liability. According to a 2003 independent survey conducted by the American Management Association, one out of every seven companies has been ordered by a court to produce e-mail as discovery in a legal proceeding. This represents a 50% increase since 2001.
Thus, mitigating the risks of severe fines and criminal charges by federal regulators and delays and difficulties during legal proceedings is the compelling value proposition of ALPs.
- 2. Does my company need to consider communications Liability Prevention?
Corporations are now being held ever more accountable for the incoming and outgoing, as well as internal data circulating through their company. Without an intelligent corporate communications solution with real-time compliance capabilities, businesses cannot effectively react to non-compliance events that can cause serious consequences, including huge fines and prison.
The colossal accounting scandals of 2001-2002 left a lasting legacy on corporate America to assume responsibility for all enterprise data. Today companies can no longer rely on their auditors to bring questionable transactions and events to light. Senior managers are now held personally accountable for the financial reporting of their public companies. Moreover, these regulations are being strictly enforced, as evidenced by the cumulative $8.25 million fine levied by the SEC on five major brokerage dealers in 2003.
Therefore, all large public companies need to assess the potential risks of not implementing a Liability Prevention solution.
- 3. What are the risks of non-compliance?
The costs far exceed the benefits of remaining non-compliant. Should your corporation experience any accounting irregularities the punishment could be severe:
- 10 years in prison and huge fines -for executing falsified reports and destroying audit records. Executives must personally certify financial reports.
- 20 years in prison — for destruction, falsification, alteration of documents in federal investigations and bankruptcy proceedings.
Moreover, federal regulators have begun to strictly enforce laws governing financial services providers and their communication with clients. Not properly maintaining electronic correspondence with customers as official records has resulted in multi-million dollar fines.
All of this is in addition to the lawsuits, loss of investor confidence, public embarrassment, and concerned clients.
- 4. How does ALPs improve transparency?
Corporations are failing to achieve the levels of transparency necessary to meet the needs of their stakeholders. Relying on informal and time-consuming enterprise compliance management practices and tools severely inhibits the ability of auditors (internal and independent), legal counsel, and even regulators to perform their duties. This in turn has a direct affect on the ability of shareholders and corporate management to make informed decisions.
By providing the mechanism to accelerate and provide more meaningful audits and evidence gathering, the ALPs improve transparency across your organization.
- 5. How does ALPs work?
Combining state-of-the-art artificial intelligence content analysis to traditional rule-based compliance management, ALPs contains a central Content Analyzer applying four detection methods of content filtering and sending a copy to the Document/Record Management System. Suspicious messages and attachments are not delivered to the intended recipient, but are sent in real-time directly to your compliance staff for action. The advantages of this technique allows:
- All detection methods to be used simultaneously, resulting in a high detection rate and a remarkably low occurrence of false alarms.
- An up-to-date, large database of linguistic heuristics to enable intellectual content analysis, and thus recognition of new and different instances of non-compliance.
- All detection methods to be controlled from a single administration point, enabling fine-tuning and customization on-site.
- 6. What are the resource requirements associated with employing ALPs? Will I need to hire additional staff?
ALPs has a low Total Cost of Ownership. There are no additional resource requirements needed to use ALPs. There is no need to hire additional staff.
ALPs provides a cost-effective solution to automate and streamline the current processes of your compliance staff without requiring complicated maintenance.
- 7. With which corporate e-mail platforms, servers, and configurations is ALPs compatible?
ALPs has been specifically designed to integrate into any existing corporate e-mail architecture. ALPs is compatible with all e-mail systems running on all e-mail servers in any configuration.
- 8. With which Document Management and Records Management systems is ALPs compatible?
ALPs works with any Document/Record Management system. It was especially designed to interact with Documentum and Hummingbird solutions, but will function with any modern DMS/RMS.
- 9. How will ALPs affect my internal workflow?
ALPs does not disrupt any of your enterprise workflow or business processes, obviating the need to train personnel in compliance. ALPs runs in the background, monitoring every outgoing, incoming, and internal e-mail message, providing constant, always-on liability prevention.
- 10. How difficult is ALPs to implement? What about my subsidiaries and geographically distributed organization?
Since it was specifically developed only for large-scale corporations, ALPs' was designed for smooth implementation without requiring any reorganization of the existing corporate IT infrastructure. Furthermore, ALPs is highly flexible and easily customizable to adapt to your particular IT environment and meet your specific compliance and liability prevention needs.
Even if each subsidiary has its own local DMS/RMS servers, databases, and repositories, The ALPS infrastructure can be extended to include geographically disperse organizations. Processing and archiving messages from different locations in a single ALPS infrastructure results in a significant reduction in both performance and capacity bottlenecks.
- 11. What kind of performance can I expect by incorporating ALPs as my Liability Prevention solution?
Performance is very important because e-mail is a vital method of business communication. Corporate users expect immediate delivery of messages.
The results of performance testing of ALPs show about 30-50 messages between 1-100 KB are processed per second on an average single processor server. The processing speed may vary depending on message size, filtering rules, and other factors. Benchmarking and other performance measurements can be undertaken to help optimize the ALPs' operation before going live.
- 12. Is ALPs scalable?
ALPs is directed towards large companies with enormous incoming/outgoing flow of processed messages. ALPs can be configured with as many filtering servers to its filtering array as needed to achieve fast and reliable processing. Additionally, ALPs' design allows different techniques to be used for load balancing.
- 13. What types of storage media does ALPs work with?
ALPs stores two types of data: transaction-based data and fixed content data. Fixed content data is invariable data information such as digital images, e-mail messages, presentations, video and audio content, CAD drawings, medical images, and check images that are static over time.
While ALPs works with most common forms of modern storage media, the rapid and growing accumulation of fixed content demands the use of storage systems and devices providing accelerated performance and sufficient scalability (for example, SAN/NAS, WORM, RAID) because data must be kept for extended periods of time to comply with the retention periods and provisions that government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
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