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Map Your Data Sources

When we built the Atlas legal hold and retention management software suite in 2004, we realized that legal and compliance executives have obligations for information they don’t own and they can’t control. Managing legal holds without equal consideration for the people, stores, and systems with custody of data is unwise and a retention program that doesn’t map to the actual location of retained information isn’t much of a retention program! Atlas software provides legal and compliance teams with a map of their complex, ever changing organization and its disparate business units, people and systems — we even named the suite Atlas because mapping is such a central concept to compliance and governance.

Atlas’s enterprise map captures and presents to legal and compliance staff a useful, sustainable map of:

The departments and organizations and the employees within them
Employees as they are terminated or are transferred
IT systems, the kinds and forms of data they store, and IT staff with relevant knowledge and expertise
Physical information stores such as vendor-managed warehouses and the program staff with vendor or storage site expertise
Which systems, physical storage and repositories are used in each organization and for which types of information
What systems were in use at a historical point in time
Who worked in an organization at a historical point in time

Atlas integrates with corporate systems, such as HR and application inventory databases to leverage existing knowledge and to ensure that information is accurate and presented in the best context for litigation and records management. The map can be populated partially or completely via these corporate systems, by importing a spreadsheet of data sources or it can be added to incrementally as new data sources, people with specialized knowledge, and information procedures are identified case by case. Atlas provides several automatic methods for updating the data, querying business and IT people about changes in system or procedure, and detecting when people or systems involved in holds change to prevent litigation problems.

The Atlas enterprise map works seamlessly with both Atlas LCC and Atlas ERM so companies can preserve with precision and confidence and dispose of information unneeded by litigation, retention law or the business.