Governing Unstructured Data With Search and AI

With the volume of data at modern organizations growing exponentially, governing access to that data and securing sensitive information can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Enter NetGovern. 

NetGovern provides businesses with solutions that judiciously secure, oversee, and provide access to their unstructured data. How do they do this? Search and AI is a big part. 

We spoke with NetGovern Founder and CEO Pierre Chamberland about what tools in the search, Solr, and AI utility belt NetGovern uses to help customers accomplish their data management goals.

 

Why is search important at NetGovern?

Search is at the heart of everything we do, in our technology, and our business. Our goal is to give organizations access to their data and help them govern their information assets. Search gives them the visibility they need and helps them to capture and structure information so it can be used in a smart way.

What new technologies are you most excited about?

We’re at the crossroads of something very exciting. Computing power and technologies like  NLP and AI are getting to the point where it now becomes possible to have a grasp on all the data an organization owns and handles. This hasn’t happened since the paper archiving era in the 40s and 60s. 

Since the inception of  computers, people have been creating and storing documents in file servers everywhere and until now there hasn’t been this control, this visibility that is becoming possible to have. Getting a handle on all that unstructured, human-generated content is what will enable organizations to create this optimal collaboration space where employees finally use all the know-how that corporations can’t extract value from today. Those assets today are with the people, and when people leave organizations, the assets are lost. Getting the ability to mine and manage corporate knowledge is huge.

Tell us about search-related innovations that you have implemented.

We leveraged Solr tech to enable federated searches. Files servers, emails, cloud repositories --  all the data they contain -- is normalized and can be searched in one place through a single query so value can be extracted from it.

Can you tell us your plans to implement AI technologies?

We already have implemented AI! And today we use it for file classification. Since our business is to help organizations govern their information, our models are trained to find sensitive data within unstructured corporate content to move it where it’s safe. We also plan on using AI in the future for content clustering, inappropriate behavior pattern detection, and communications compliance in the financial industry. 

Our vision is to eventually have AI act as a human assistant in any content search, whether it’s for compliance, business purposes, or eDiscovery. We’d like our models to autosuggest potential relevant documents based on what the users are doing, dynamically. The AI would be constantly learning instead of being trained, in a fully dynamic fashion, so it could perform whole searches by itself with high levels of certainty.

How is the search team at NetGovern growing?

By leaps and bounds! We’ve been doing NLP and AI for 4 years. We’ve started the effort by engaging in very strong collaboration with local universities and we’ve been building that team. Every year there’s a crop of new interns and staff being added to that team and we want to keep investing in search and AI expertise as it’s what will move our technology forward.

How do you engage with and support the open-source community?

Locally we’ve hosted the Solr meetup group a few times to let Solr enthusiasts get training and exchange ideas. We’re also starting to create an open standard for document classification. More to come in the next year.

What are you excited to learn about at Activate this year?

Definitely the Spark Solr module and streaming functionalities.

Join NetGovern at ACTIVATE to learn how to leverage Solr and AI to better manage unstructured data. Register for ACTIVATE before September 6 to save $200.

Pierre Chamberland, Founder & CEO Bio: Serial Entrepreneur / Biz Coach / Mentor. I am passionate about product design, user interfaces, cool technology & clever marketing. Love to build high-performance teams, who create great brands and even stronger cultures. I thrive in environments that are funky, authentic, engaging, and superbly efficient.