Software developer Aparavi has launched a new platform available  in the Azure Marketplace that enables data discovery with automated classification and data optimization (including removal).

The company says it reduces the complexity and cost of managing large unstructured data volumes. It gives users visibility and insight into data, and, more critically, triggers action based on its lifecycle, access requirement, content, risk level, regulatory policy, and hundreds of other criteria.

It finds data across the boundaries of diverse systems and locations and unlocks its full value through sophisticated search, index, and classification functions to create an organized virtual data lake for modern applications.

Managing data lifecycles and effective information governance are priorities for today’s enterprises. Aparavi’s platform provides intelligence into the data and its business relevance, finding data across the entire enterprise, regardless of where it resides, through powerful automation tools that discover, classify, optimize, and enable innovation while reducing human error.

Earlier this year Aparavi introduced its Early Access Program, which provides access and use of Aparavi products to a select set of customers and strategic partners before the rest of the market, along with direct access to the Aparavi product team. This program will continue and is open to new members aiding in shaping feature design, capabilities, and continuous improvement in end user experience. Among the many early adopters of the Aparavi Platform were A.O. Smith, a leading manufacturer of hot water solutions for homes and businesses, and Modus, a top-tier provider of information governance and eDiscovery solutions.

"We have over 30 years of data spread across data centres, servers, storage, and distributed endpoints and were challenged with finding the data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and reducing costs without introducing more complexity," said Jim Solomon, Director of Infrastructure at A. O. Smith.

"With Aparavi we have been able to find and drill down on the data easily and report and make decisions quickly, resulting in major reduction in time with significant cost savings in people resources and data infrastructure."

"As specialists in data governance, The Aparavi Platform is helping our clients automate data management and control exponential licensing and infrastructure costs as their data grows," said Steven Williams, VP of Information Governance at Modus

"Relevance is a critical factor in everything we do with clients and internal operations. We constantly need to know the significance and relevance of the information we manage and the ability to properly reduce the information we do not need."

The time and frustration involved in finding, accessing, and being able to govern data without cost and complexity is plaguing enterprises. According to an IDC survey (Source: Unstructured, Undefined, Unknown: What Do You Really Know About Your Data?, March 2020), 66% of enterprise users admitted a lack of understanding the value of their own corporate data, and 31% of workers reported frustration at knowledge locked away in unstructured documents. Search occupied an astounding 25% of their weekly tasks, and governance 21%.

"Data growth is a given, and tools that manage or assist with data privacy and risk are increasingly important," said Ryan O’Leary, IDC Legal, Risk, and Compliance Senior Research Analyst. "Information governance and compliance are a top priority not only for IT workers but chief corporate officers and all departmental and line-of-business employees."

"Companies simply cannot continue to hoard data ‘just in case’ while not having the slightest concept that they are just sitting on their most business-critical asset, with zero insight and zero ability to properly leverage it," said Adrian Knapp, Aparavi founder and CEO.

"On top of that they continue to grossly misspend resources to continually move it from place to place instead of fully understanding it and putting it to work for the good of the business. Truly knowing your data immediately delivers greater business insight and allows you to optimize or right size the infrastructure to save corporations millions. Aparavi, The Platform saves firms up to 40% in infrastructure costs while gaining critical data insight and reducing risks – all of which ultimately ensures true competitive advantage."

The Platform addresses solution use cases of finding and controlling data, optimizing data availability for cost savings, and fuelling innovation.

Capabilities and benefits include:

• Classification, Index, Discovery, and Reporting in one easy-to-use interface Aparavi provides comprehensive data intelligence and management in one platform, rather than licensing numerous expensive complex products, and gives a clear understanding of unstructured data from cradle to grave. More than 140 predefined classifications address regulatory compliance for vertical industries and countries, with more than 800 patterns recognized.
• Automated Control over All Unstructured Data Assign retention policies to unstructured data and automatically copy, move, and delete based on those policies. The Platform empowers users with the insight to know what can, can’t, and should be deleted based on regulatory or nonregulatory requirements. The Platform addresses all unstructured data down to the content and metadata level, even image and video files and their OCR text.
• Data Visualization and Cost Analysis Understand what data exists, where it resides, who owns it, and how much it costs to maintain. Aparavi aids in data and IT consolidation by identifying and classifying critical data and redundant, obsolete, trivial data that can be removed, typically delivering 30% to 40% savings in data infrastructure.
• Core to Edge/Cloud/Endpoint Support Users can manage risk, cost, and data sprawl no matter where unstructured data is stored. Alleviate risk and prevent data leakage across distributed repositories in data center storage, cloud storage, and even endpoints for a true defensible deletion policy. This comprehensive control makes it easy to comply with requests to remove data such as personally identifiable information (PII) for GDPR, CCPA compliance, and other regulations, as well as to meet subject access requests or legal holds.
• Storage-Agnostic Unlike point solutions that are bound to their specific systems or single-purpose tools, Aparavi can discover and index data without requiring it to be copied, moved, or egressed first – further reducing cost and time to insight, while minimizing storage, security and performance impacts.
• Flexible Deployment The Platform is SaaS-based but has the flexibility to be deployed on-premises through Aparavi and Aparavi authorized partners, for customers with unique needs.

Aparavi, The Platform SaaS version, is exclusively available on the Microsoft Azure marketplace as a part of Aparavi’s status with Microsoft that gives the company access to Microsoft CSPs with expertise in the use cases and workloads Aparavi addresses. The Platform also gives vertical sales engagement in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, legal, and federal government.

Pricing for Aparavi, The Platform starts at $US1,788 per month for up to 50 terabytes of data or 50 million files under management, with 5 classification policies for the Business Pack. A ‘Starter’ release of the Aparavi Platform, supporting up to 5 TBs or five million files with one classification policy, is available today on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace at no charge. This allows users to easily test-drive the solution and then simply scale with purchase of additional files/capacity and classification policies or work directly with their Microsoft CSP.

https://www.aparavi.com