KOM Networks and its OEM partner, Hyland Software, announced the release of a seamless integration of KOMpliance with OnBase, Hyland’s enterprise content management software suite. Much of the value of the integration derives from how it combines the familiarity of OnBase with a standard file system interface. This provides the simplicity of direct address access, secure storage and file protection using a standard file system.

A secure archive storage solution for OnBase disk groups, KOMpliance is designed to secure, protect and enforce retention of electronic information, strengthen data security, and leverage existing storage infrastructure. This allows businesses large and small across all industries to meet the most stringent regulatory compliance requirements.

KOMpliance is available in a variety of configurations, is fully redundant, and can be scaled to meet a wide range of performance requirements and storage capacity demands. The integration is available with the release of OnBase 10, and requires minimal effort to implement. This integrated solution specifically addresses the customers’ budgetary constraints and compliance requirements to mitigate the risks of data loss, data corruption, accidental deletion, and viruses without impacting existing business process and workflow.

KOMpliance prohibits unauthorized access of retained data, protects files from being manipulated or deleted, and automatically enforces OnBase retention and destruction policies. The integration provides additional levels of security against both internal and external threats.

Guidance Software, a provider of digital investigative solutions, has released a new unified e-discovery software platform that provides legal and information technology teams with an in-house electronic discovery system that enables better case decisions, faster, while reducing risk and lowering costs. Guidance Software’s EnCase eDiscovery Version 4 provides a single, unified solution that addresses all of the stages of the electronic discovery process that companies want to bring in-house.

EnCase eDiscovery enables enterprises to understand what their data universe looks like, who has what data and how much they have—all available early, before collection and processing of data occurs. Users can quickly identify relevant data sources, get metrics on total data versus potentially relevant data, and understand how much data could be eliminated, which provides a solid understanding of the case’s potential costs, keywords and custodians. With this unique capability, corporate attorneys can test search criteria before electronically stored information is collected, and customers can determine how to negotiate search terms, date and time criteria and file types before the meet-and-confer with opposing counsel. Through this optimized process, enterprises gain clear advantages with assessment before collection.

EnCase eDiscovery enables organizations to understand case facts rapidly, better prepare for meet and confer conferences, negotiate keywords with opponents, and perform first-pass review in-house to reduce data sets prior to outside attorney review, thereby increasing speed and reducing cost.

Lowered Risk

EnCase eDiscovery lowers risk in three ways. First, it eliminates the need to deploy multiple products just to address e-discovery. Second, it bridges the gap between legal and IT through a common shared data repository and purpose-built interfaces for legal and IT, thereby ensuring better information flow within an organization, and making it easier to have a defensible, repeatable, e-discovery process.

Third, eighty percent of the risk in the e-discovery process is in legal hold, collection and preservation. Part of the unified EnCase eDiscovery system is a legal hold capability that ensures legal obligations are met with better management, tracking and enforcement of legal holds. EnCase eDiscovery also eliminates the need for licensing and management of a separate legal hold point solution. EnCase eDiscovery quickly and easily collects and preserves content across the network—from live email servers, desktops, laptops, file servers, and more—without any disruption to employee day-to-day operations.

3M announced on Aug. 30 it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cogent Systems. The proposed transaction has an aggregate value of approximately $943 million, or approximately $430 million net of cash acquired.

Cogent provides finger, palm, face and iris biometric systems for governments, law enforcement agencies, and commercial enterprises. Its Automated Fingerprint and Palmprint Identification Systems (AFIS), enable customers to capture fingerprint and palm print images electronically, encode prints into searchable files, and accurately compare a set of fingerprints/palm prints to a database containing potentially millions of prints in seconds.

Identification and authentication solutions from 3M include border management products; document manufacturing and issuance systems for IDs, passports, and visas; document readers and verification products; and security materials, such as laminates, to protect against counterfeiting and tampering.

With approximately $130 million in revenue in 2009, Cogent Systems is based in Pasadena, Calif., and employs approximately 500 people. The company has operations in Ohio, Virginia, Austria, Canada, China, and the United Kingdom. Cogent Systems would be part of 3M’s Security Systems Division.

Smarsh, the managed service leader in innovative, secure and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, and LIMRA, a provider of research, consulting, and other services to insurance and financial services companies worldwide, have announced a strategic partnership. Smarsh will serve as the exclusive provider for e-mail, instant message, Bloomberg message and text message monitoring and archiving, as well as compliant financial Websites for LL Global Services, the parent company of LIMRA and its affiliates.

Smarsh and LIMRA will also team to produce a series of online and live events aimed at providing ongoing support and insights on relevant issues and best practices for managing electronic communications compliance.

The Smarsh hosted e-mail and electronic messaging platform enables firms to capture, preserve, search, monitor and produce all incoming, outgoing and internal e-mail, instant messages, Bloomberg messages and text messages, satisfying SEC and FINRA electronic messaging compliance requirements. Smarsh Financial Visions offers turnkey and customizable compliant website production and hosting services for insurance and financial services companies.

EMC has unveiled the RSA Solution for Cloud Security and Compliance for comprehensively managing security, risk and regulatory compliance of cloud infrastructures, helping increase customer confidence to virtualize business-critical applications.

The RSA Solution for Cloud Security and Compliance helps enable organizations to rationalize a multitude of compliance requirements, control frameworks, standards and best practices into a set of centralized security policies that can be applied to virtual infrastructure. Simple dashboards are designed to make it easy to visualize security and compliance posture. Through automated assessments and simple workflows, the solution helps streamline the process of managing tasks between security teams that define policies and IT operations teams responsible for implementing those policies.

Capabilities delivered as part of the RSA solution include:

• Dashboard views: based on the RSA Archer eGRC platform designed to enable fast and accurate assessment of security and compliance posture across physical and VMware virtual infrastructure.

• Top-Down Visibility for Control and Compliance: The RSA solution includes a comprehensive, centralized library and ready reference of security controls within the RSA Archer platform. This library has been expanded to cover more than 100 VMware-specific controls that map the most current, global regulations such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA. New software available with RSA Archer automates the measurement of several VMware configuration elements to simplify the task of measuring compliance. RSA enVision is being enhanced to add further intelligence to the RSA Archer platform by updating the compliance assessments with security-relevant events. RSA enVision collects security events from an ecosystem of products including the RSA Data Loss Prevention suite, VMware vShield, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager, EMC Ionix, and HyTrust appliance to enrich the compliance reports provided by the RSA Archer platform.

• Process Automation for Managing Remediation of Security Policies: The RSA Solution for Cloud Security and Compliance leverages automated workflow and notification processes in RSA Archer to simplify the tasks of remediating security issues.

Tripwire, a global provider of IT security and compliance automation solutions, announced plans to collaborate with Terremark Worldwide to jointly offer a cloud-based log management solution with Tripwire Log Center. This collaboration aims to help users more easily identify events of interest in real-time to reduce the time and effort to detect and mitigate security risk.

The offering provides fast availability and enablement of log aggregation and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) by storing business critical data on virtual Tripwire Servers in Terremark’s secure cloud environments. Tripwire and Terremark will enable customers to have on-demand access to log and compliance management files, reports, custom dashboards and online analysis tools to help companies achieve and maintain continuous compliance while reducing the need for on-premise administration, servers, storage, security risks and hassles.

This solution is available for Terremark Cloud-based customers, Terremark Data Center Co-located, Managed Hosting customers and at Customer Premise locations. The solution helps provide clear visibility into events and traffic, and enables compliance reporting for Payment Card Industry, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, ISO27000, Sarbanes Oxley and other legal, compliance and privacy laws and initiatives.

Second City Communications, the corporate training wing of famed comedy troupe Second City (and the gang that had our readers laughing until they cried at Compliance Week 2010) officially announced the launch of RealBiz Shorts.

RealBiz Shorts are short, funny videos that get real about crucial ethics and compliance challenges all businesses face. Co-created with corporate ethics and compliance thought leaders, these videos cut through the clutter of typical business communications to engage employees and get them thinking differently about their actions.

With the idea that humorous messages are more likely to be heard, retained and shared, RealBiz Shorts were designed to support and enliven current training programs. Embed them in presentations, post them on your intranet, e-mail them, push them to mobile devices…use them to launch new policies, kick off annual initiatives, or point people to ethics and compliance resources. Things are only funny when they’re true, and RealBiz Shorts will help employees see what’s true and vitally important in ethics and compliance. After all, you can’t bore people into changing behavior.

Currently, RealBiz Shorts has 30 video clips covering 20 ethics and compliance topics. Check them out at http://www.realbizshorts.com/#

Kroll Ontrack, a provider of information management, legal technologies, and data recovery products and services, has launched Intelligent Prioritization within Ontrack Inview Version 6.2, now available in the United States and United Kingdom.

This new feature is designed to empower legal teams to conduct review in a more accurate, defensible manner, and significantly reduces the time and costs associated with review, which has traditionally been a human-intensive, decision-making process. Traditional document review is typically conducted in a linear fashion without regard to the importance of the information contained within the data. Revolutionizing document review, Intelligent Review Technology (IRT) is built on automated workflow (an automated means to distribute and check-in documents during the review process), the technological framework upon which other aspects of IRT are able to function. Intelligent Prioritization, the first capability under the IRT umbrella, analyzes reviewer categorization decisions and visually identifies and elevates the documents that are potentially responsive, enabling reviewers to review the most relevant documents to the case first.

With access to all of the potentially relevant documents at the earliest stage of review, legal teams can obtain a more comprehensive picture of the case and make better informed, strategic decisions sooner. Furthermore, by prioritizing the most relevant documents for review, review managers can allocate resources accordingly and eliminate the potential discovery of critical case elements late in a document review.

In addition, Kroll Ontrack’s Workflow Professional Services team is prepared to help clients leverage Intelligent Prioritization, further transforming their review process to achieve the consistency, speed and cost savings of automation. Clients also have the option of using Kroll Ontrack’s Document Review Services, facilities and team of expert legal document reviewers to fully leverage Ontrack Inview’s advanced capabilities.

Exterro, a provider of legal governance, risk and compliance management solutions, announced the integration of Recommind’s Axcelerate ECA & Collection with Exterro Fusion e-discovery and legal hold workflow management solution suite.

Today’s legal departments must communicate effectively with both custodians and IT managers in order to effectively scope and implement litigation holds and conduct collection tasks. The unified legal and IT approach provided by Exterro and Recommind, a predictive information management provider, enables companies to manage holds, precisely predict and scope discovery costs, determine early case strategy, streamline collections, eliminate rework and human error, and review and produce less data.

Exterro Fusion simplifies the process of creating a legal hold, identifying custodians and data, and issuing notifications. The result is a solution that provides the collaboration, automation, and usability required to provide a defensible approach to meeting today’s complex litigation needs. Integration with Recommind’s Axcelerate ECA & Collection wraps in the legal process, including preservation, collection, ECA, processing, review and production needed to manage the legal hold process and control costs from end to end. Exterro Fusion discovery workflow monitors progress and completes the legal process loop.

The law firm of Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis announced that it has added an International Human Rights Compliance component to its White Collar Defense & Corporate Compliance Group.

The addition springs from the increased need for multinational companies to assess market entry or ongoing business operations through a human rights impact assessment as a matter of corporate due diligence. Such assessments have largely been done by companies in the mining or oil exploration (extractive) industries when they were entering a host country that was economically underdeveloped or conflict ridden and, as a result, had few human rights safeguards.

Companies in all industries face far more subtle, but serious intersections with human rights issues, like censorship and local government laws and customs. Firms coming into the U.S. or another economically developed country to do business need to employ a human rights impact assessment. For example, the connections of even one multinational company executive with a questionable or sanctioned government or practice may be perceived as transgressing human rights standards and may stop a deal or a market entry.

The International Human Rights Compliance Group counsels multinationals, both foreign and domestic, in a number of areas: assessments, governance, transactions and dispute resolution or litigation. The corporate and litigation attorneys in this Group have the capability to draw from any of the firm’s comprehensive menu of legal practice areas to meet a client’s requirements for efficiency and cost management.

It can assist clients in the following areas:

• Performing risk assessments, audits, internal investigations;
• Implementing prevention programs, including creating codes of conduct, internal policies, training and complaint procedures;
• Assisting clients with public responses and inquiries from media, government personnel and nongovernmental organizations;
• Drafting of memoranda and agreements with third parties and government agencies;
• Advising clients on due diligence and risk mitigation;
• Representing parties on human rights risks in M&A and other transactions;
• Defending clients in disputes and litigation in state and federal courts, before administrative agencies and the UN;
• Identifying and supervising counsel in foreign jurisdictions; and
• Educating clients about the extent to which they may have legal “exposure” based on the conduct of companies with which they “partner.”