Case Study

BAM

BAM Ireland is the holding company for all BAM’s operating companies in Ireland. One of the largest multinational construction businesses.

Waterford Technologies Makes Sense of Unstructured Data for BAM and Gives them Peace of Mind

Company BACKGROUND

Established in 1958, BAM Ireland is the largest multinational construction business operating nationally with expertise and experience in the delivery of many of Ireland’s flagship infrastructural and building projects.

This success story was written in conjunction with Enterprise Ireland and BAM.

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Introduction

According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Given that a quintillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, it’s fair to say that’s a lot of data.

This includes everything from humble tweets, google searches and web browsing, through to challenging unstructured data sources, such as corporate emails and files – the type of data that can’t be easily searched or managed. While much of this data can be considered ephemera, much of it is also highly valuable – and fraught with risk.

Our online and cloud interactions with customers, clients, employees, and partners are producing data sets containing corporate and personal information. Emails and files contain vast amounts of corporate intelligence, not only in their contents, much of which is commercially sensitive but in the meta of the email communication pattern itself.

But without proper indexing, those data sets are left siloed across a company’s network, and without secure storage and compliance, firms are vulnerable to a host of regulatory and privacy issues. With GDPR now firmly in place, stiff penalties await firms without a handle on how it is managed.

HOW WATERFORD TECHNOLOGIES HELPED BAM

Having an encrypted email data archive that is fully searchable has many benefits for MailMeter users. Construction group, BAM Ireland, was an early adopter of Waterford Technologies’ MailMeter, and subsequently, ComplyKey.

While there are obvious and immediate benefits to archiving email for the IT network capacity, the indexing proved a key tool for the firm, said BAM’s Global Director of IT Services, Tim McCarthy.
THE CHALLENGE

Archiving is vitally important for information management. In the construction industry changes happen to specifications as projects progress, a record of these changes needs to be kept. BAM required an archiving solution that enabled their organisation to store sensitive information that may be critical to business use and sometimes litigation, in a tamper-proof state for the desired duration.

Construction projects invariably will see variations to specifications once live and keeping a definitive unalterable record of who said what to whom and when is vital, said McCarthy.

The Solution

“The reason we chose a tool like MailMeter is that a lot of our business is based around being able to prove the facts of a discussion or a conversation.”

Waterford Technologies’ ComplyKey is not only able to securely archive a company’s email and network files but also to index it and make it searchable including attachments of any type.

The benefits are many: not only are network infrastructure resources freed up across an organisation but in sorting the data companies can build robust audit trails on that data, opening up new areas of business intelligence and analytics to meeting compliance requirements for GDPR or Freedom of Information requests.

“We’ve never lost an email – ever”

“From a pure IT perspective, we have a clean data environment and an environment that cannot be tampered with by individual users and it gives us great comfort knowing it is there and cannot be tampered with.”

Only those with administrative rights can manipulate the data for GDPR motives such as tag, delete, apply retention policies, legal hold, or access block capabilities to relevant data.

It may be hard to quantify the direct cost savings to a firm such as BAM, which handles six million emails a year and has archived 47 million with MailMeter, but it is clear that it gives McCarthy one thing – peace of mind.

If you are looking for an email and/or file management solution that gives you peace of mind,
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