Meet Sydney, our latest Aiimi Insight Engine release.

Designed to shine a light on your hidden data, the latest Sydney release is more powerful than ever at helping you connect your known data with your ‘dark’ data – and better secure your high-risk data. I caught up with Sonia Chaudhry, Product Owner of the Aiimi Insight Engine, to find out how the latest upgrade will unlock even more data-driven value for your business.

Hi Sonia. It sounds like Aiimi Labs have been firing on all cylinders to launch this brand-new release, Sydney. Can you sketch out the backstory and explain how the name came about?

Hi Helen. At Aiimi Labs, our team is forever busy toiling away behind the scenes. That’s because we’re determined to deliver innovative new software solutions that deal with the most pressing data risks and opportunities driving businesses today. We embrace a collaborative user-centric approach to how we design, build, test, and validate every feature delivered in the product so that our customers and users have the very best experience.

Sydney’s our latest release, set to launch on 28th July, following hot on the heels of Moscow, New York, Oslo, Paris, Queenstown, and Rome. Inspired by our team, each city stands for a new version of the core product – the Aiimi Insight Engine – which we operate on a quarterly cycle across the calendar year.

The ‘Say Hello to Sydney’ video has really piqued my curiosity. Can you tell me more about how the Sydney release will help businesses unlock even more valuable insights from their data?

Well, Sydney’s our second major release of this year so far, and its 26 new product features are here to enhance the insight engine’s offerings around privacy and compliance, migration, and shining a light on dark data. From an ongoing research perspective, we’re also seeking new and innovative ways to improve the quality and performance of the Aiimi Insight Engine, with an emphasis on presenting accurate and relevant insights to users. We also focus on optimising the underlying platform and enhancing its overall speed.

All organisations continually collect, process, and store vast volumes of data during their day-to-day business activities. A lot of this content stays buried, unknown, and unused, hiding in the shadows. This hugely wasted but potentially risky resource is often dubbed ‘dark’ data. The Sydney release of the Aiimi Insight Engine helps businesses surface all information and secure high-risk data with its two new spotlight features, Data Map and Automatic Risk Profiling.

Can you dig deeper into the Data Map to explain how it helps users to uncover more value from their content?

Using the new Data Map, users can view and access curated data in the context of the data’s respective domain areas, connecting the physical world of data with the diverse functions of the organisation. Users can now avoid the time-consuming task of searching through lots of disparate systems.

In addition, a Data Map is integral to promoting a crowd-sourced approach to data governance, whereby data owners are part of the map’s profile. In the future, this user experience could also be extended to create a more dynamic data catalogue browsing experience for data lakes, such Azure and BigQuery.

However, although organisations are increasingly investing in AI technology to power data-driven business solutions, cultural barriers stall widespread adoption of data-led initiatives like the Data Map. According to NVP’s Big Data and AI Executive Survey 2021, only 39.3% of firms manage data as a business asset, with just 24.4% forging a data culture. Until businesses treat, protect, and manage their data as a valuable asset, they will fall short of realising its full potential.

One of the first steps firms can take to successfully implement data governance is to appoint a Data Owner, tasked with accountability for the quality, accessibility, and general oversight of one or more datasets at your organisation. Data Owners and Stewards are pivotal to business success, and yet the role is still a rare bird.

What about the second spotlight feature, Automatic Risk Profiling? How does this new tool support privacy and compliance?

The Aiimi Insight Engine automatically figures out the risk level of each personal, sensitive, and confidential file across an entire enterprise, rating all data from low to very high. In the Sydney release, we’ve progressed this feature to more representatively calculate the risk of each file in context, offering even better compliance support.

Now, if a data subject is also referenced in the path URL for that file, the insight engine recognises that this would indicate increased risk, classifying the file as high-risk. Conversely, for example, surveys containing personal information that are in the public domain are now down-weighted as low risk.

Users can also configure a list of set exclusion terms likely to show a false-positive and automatically downgrade their risk rating. One example is the search term ‘lump sum’. Files featuring this financial term are often flagged as high-risk for GDPR compliance, owing to the medical term ‘lump’. Adding context to a search like ‘lump sum’ results in more accurate risk-ratings, reducing such false-positives.

So, what else can we expect from Sydney?

Well, as you know, the Aiimi Insight Engine was built with compliance in mind. The sensitive data auditing and DSAR response tools allow our customers to be fully aware of the risks in their data, and rapidly respond to a DSAR request with a fully redacted document collection.

Sydney builds on this by enabling a DSAR user to also show a covering letter and related policies, alongside the personal DSAR files, to the data subject in a PDF format. The next value-added step we’re currently working on will be full disclosure via an online portal, due in our upcoming releases.

When is the next upgrade after Sydney due to be rolled out, and what will be its spotlight feature?

We’ve got another major release in the pipeline for 2021. The Tokyo upgrade is next in line, and will focus on calculating risk based on user behaviour. As we move into 2022, we’ll be working on our Utrecht release. Watch this space to find out more!

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Discover the features coming to the Aiimi Insight Engine in our Sydney release:

Insight Engine (Core Product)

• Sharing Saved Searches
• Named Entity Recognition (Domain Specific Training)
• Synonym Detection
• Source Filters Category Grouping
• Data Map

Migration Solution

• Post Migration Report (CSV)
• Basic Scheduling
• Migration Pipeline Enrichment Exception Tracker

Data Privacy & Compliance Solution

• Risk Calculation 2.0
• Review Action on a DSAR Collection
• DSAR Disclosure Template Message (PDF)
• Subject Specific Policies Disclosure (PDF)
• DSAR Universal Policies Disclosure (PDF)
• DSAR Universal Policy Configuration
• DSAR Data Subject Settings, Subject Specific Policies + Cover Message Configuration

Platform Maintenance & Improvements

• Merge Scheduling Options
• Content Server Connector Fix (.Net 5 Upgrade)
• Allowlist/Denylist
• Control Hub Pagination
• Self-Throttling Agents - Confluence + Web