Google has launched an Enterprise Search Engine, which saves organisations time and money by giving their users lightning-fast access to the information they need within the enterprise.
Veena Pather, Business Unit Executive of Faritec’s Google Enterprise Division, says organisations are buckling under the weight of huge volumes of unstructured data. From sales presentations to proposals, white papers and enterprise reports, the unstructured data in the enterprise is growing at a far quicker pace than structured data.
“Typically, the unstructured data contains the company’s intellectual capital. Organisations need a mechanism for getting this information to the people that need it quickly. And there’s no better way to do this than with the world’s leading search technology,” Pather says.
Pather advises companies looking for a search solution to consider a number of vital differentiators, including: simplicity; security and confidentiality; and the flexibility to read information stored in disparate file formats.
Google Search addresses this by adhering to each customer’s existing security policies. By supporting governance tools such as ActiveDirectory and Novell’s eDirectory, Google Search ensures that users only gain access to information they are allowed to view.
Furthermore, Google’s search engine reads more than 220 different file formats. Just as the Google Internet search engine allows users to view Microsoft Word documents or PDF files online with nothing more than a web browser, it does the same in the organisation.
Commenting on benefits for the IT department, Pather says the fact that Google’s solution is appliance-based is of paramount importance.
“The IT department simply plugs in the appliance and gives it the required access to the organisation’s information based on a single authoritative source – there’s nothing else involved in rolling it out,” she says. Some companies have required Faritec to customise the look and feel in line with their corporate brand identity especially where Search is viewed as the new user interface for all the organisations information access needs.
The appliance has built-in redundancy to curtail against data loss and the failure of certain components. From the outset, it is scaled to provide a guaranteed 25 queries per second – and scales up according to the size of the business. As volumes grow, the business can buy additional appliances and cluster them together.
“As an enterprise partner for Google in South Africa, Faritec is perfectly positioned to demystify the search space and help organisations get on the right track when it comes to implementing a viable search solution,” Pather says.
