Stories in the press about “lurid” e-mails that threaten to bring down the world’s financial community seem to occur almost as often as stories about another Greek bailout.
These stories demonstrate to me two things:
1. Companies have a lot of the information they need to sniff out wrongdoing
2. They are not analysing that information in any meaningful way, so they are not finding it
Oh, and in most cases, they don’t have access to the really juicy stuff that people say on the phone. Yes, I sound like a broken record, but why is it that people are happy to retain and search e-mail (and increasingly IM) traffic, but they just throw voice away? Go figure.
Yes, you can gather all of your information in one place. The capture tools are there, and the repositories are there to store them, like Symantec’s Enterprise Vault. And the analysis tools are there, in real time (which is of course what we do), or after the event forensics (like my friends at Clearwell).
My New Year resolution this year is to wake people up to the need to capture and index all of their data, and having done so, perform some analysis on it. No, there is not a bogeyman lurking in every e-mail or phone conversation, but if you don’t look, you’ll never find.
