Unite your business data with enterprise search software

Many modern organisations rely heavily on third-party services for part or all of their daily business workflow. Software as a service (SaaS) solutions offer cheap and convenient services that empower businesses to work productively without the responsibility of developing or maintaining the software that powers the platforms. This comes with many benefits but it can also lead to the fragmentation of your organisation's data. This is the problem that enterprise search aims to solve.

Why is data fragmentation and data access an issue?

Data fragmentation is a somewhat dated term that used to apply to single computers. Sometimes data on a hard drive would become fragmented, meaning it would be split across different hard drive sectors and become difficult to retrieve. This old problem has a very similar modern parallel, so similar it is often called mass data fragmentation. The problem here is very similar - businesses data is fragmented, except this time it is because the data is stored in different physical locations, third-party services, data centres and remote offices. Organisations continue to suffer from the same problems - data is hard to find and unite when it is needed.

Why does search data need unifying?

There are different pressures on different organisations that provide reasons for why unifying data is a good idea. Some organisations rely heavily on multiple third-party SaaS solutions, whereas others use a very limited software stack. Regardless of this, all organisations at a minimum must comply with regulatory requirements surrounding data use and storage. Regulations such as GDPR in Europe and CCPA in the USA have placed burdens on organisations on how they store and retrieve data.

One commonality among these regulations is that an organisation must be able to retrieve all data held on an individual upon request and also be able to delete it all upon request. Without getting bogged down by the specifics of the regulations, this essentially means that all organisations must be able to find and retrieve any and all information held on a particular individual at any time.

This can represent a significant problem for business with significant mass data fragmentation. A customer's data may be split across an organisation's CRM, marketing campaign manager, sales database, and on internal local area network storage devices, to name just a few possibilities. Manually finding and retrieving the entirety of a customer's data can be a daunting and time-consuming task.

How enterprise search software combats mass data fragmentation

Enterprise search software is the functional equivalent of having a private version of Google, Microsoft Bing or elasticsearch for your organisation. When you search the web with Google or another search engine, it doesn't matter where the data is stored, in what language it is written in or in what file format it is stored. Contemporary search engines are capable of returning relevant search results for text documents, emails, videos, images, audio files, slideshow presentations and plenty of other formats.

Enterprise search software makes solving the problems listed above relatively simple. First, all sources of data used by an organisation must be gathered. This data does not have to come in a particular structure, come from a particular source or be formatted in a particular way. Instead, many pre-built connectors for existing popular SaaS services and other platforms are readily available, making gathering data simple. Once data has been gathered, it is then analysed and indexed. This important step helps to establish relationships between data sets and enrich the data.

Enterprise search software is much more powerful than simply searching by keywords, however. Advanced linguistics concepts and natural language processing are used in order to comprehend not simply surface-level content, but also the deeper meaning of a text. When this means in a context relevant to many organisations is the ability for enterprise search software to understand when a name is mentioned across several disparate documents, comprehending it represents a person and automatically building a profile of that person using the gathered information. All of this is done automatically through machine learning processes using existing data.

Data driven content analytics

Enterprise search software has the ability to not only unite, but also to analyse, the data that an organisation connects. For organisations that typically rely on multiple third-party services, it may be the first time that all of that data is collectively analysed. This can highlight previously unknown relationships between data sets - for example, sales data and employee attendance records can be cross-referenced to compare which employees are working on the best and worst-performing days.

Secure search engine software for your organisation

Enterprise search software works similarly to a private, internal Google or Microsoft Bing search engine that is specifically trained on your organisation's data. It can be searched in much the same way and can represent relationships between different unstructured data sets. Individual customers and suppliers can be identified and collated from different platforms and services without any manual effort. Enterprise search software not only unites all of an organisation's data but also analyses it to establish relationships while making all of this data as easily accessible as searching the web on Google.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes