Bloomberg Vault Dives Into Dark Data
Bloomberg's enterprise information management service, Bloomberg Vault, is expanding its capabilities into "dark data" with the launch of its File Analytics product.
The new hybrid cloud service enables enterprises to manage dark data, which Bloomberg defines as unstructured data that is difficult to identify, categorize, track, and manage. Dark data can include messaging, social, files, documents, and voice.
"This is a way to help the industry solve its challenge around unstructured data," said Harald Collet, global head of Bloomberg Vault, in a recent interview at Bloomberg's New York City headquarters. "Eighty percent of [unstructured] data is generated by humans in the form of documents, emails, and recorded phone calls and is typically harder for employees to manage." With the explosion of data, firms have a file drawer full of documents, contracts, and shared information. One organization working with Bloomberg had more than 1 pedabyte of data. "This represents discovery risk."
A 2011 IDC study (sponsored by EMC) found that the world's digital data (which includes measurement files, video, music files, and so on) is doubling every two years. Financial services companies are grappling with a big data problem sparked by the adoption of new regulations and compliance requirements.
Bloomberg Vault File Analytics is designed to help firms address these data challenges and derive more value from their data by enabling them to manage, analyze, and control large amounts of enterprise information, Collet said. "What people want is analytics."
Polygon Global Partners, a global investment firm, tested Bloomberg Vault File Analytics over the past several months. "Like most businesses in our space, we handle large volumes of unstructured data," Polygon's technology chief, Neil Roberts, said in a press release. "Bloomberg Vault File Analytics is a mechanism to better extract key insight and analysis from this data while also allowing us to responsibly maintain the correct audit trail for compliance and recording keeping."
Bloomberg said in the release that File Analytics helps organizations mitigate risk and alleviate the concerns of compliance, legal, or risk management. Legal and compliance professionals can use it for policy-based record retention, regulatory investigations, e-discovery collection, and deletion of corporate data based on best-practices. For example, firms can run policies off File Analytics for social media and voice data.
Trade reconstruction
Two weeks ago, Bloomberg Vault announced the results of a study on the challenges of meeting the CFTC trade reconstruction requirements under the Dodd-Frank Act for swap dealers and major swap participants. The informal survey was conducted at a roundtable that Bloomberg Vault and Compliance Risk Concepts hosted at Bloomberg headquarters.
Only 7% of the compliance officers attending felt confident they were ready for meet the CFTC's requirements. Trade reconstruction is another type of information analytics that File Analytics can handle for firms facing complex recordkeeping requirements.
Firms must reconstruct a trade within 72 hours, while the information cuts across different transaction systems, Collet said. File Analytics will help firms reconstruct their swap trades, including searching for and tagging unstructured data with trade and legal entity identifiers, which 100% of survey participants said was the hardest part of pre-trade workflow.
IT executives can leverage the technology for file reporting, intelligent data migration, and more cost-efficient storage management across their enterprise data and file shares, according to the release.
In terms of delivering the service, Bloomberg maintains that it's one of the few firms solving this problem with cloud technology.
"We're going to be working with our clients on how to manage this data using a hybrid cloud approach," Collet said. Bloomberg Vault runs on the Bloomberg cloud, which is "a unique, secured private cloud." The company operates more than 120 data center sites, and it has the scalability and advanced security to support global enterprises.
With the adoption of many new regulations, Bloomberg Vault can provide these services at a lower cost, and with better service-level agreements, than IT departments, Collet said.
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