cting as a “compelling event” in the adoption of new breeds of risk management and corporate compliance products and services are the recently highlighted fraudulent business practices occurring within many of America’s Fortune 1000 corporations. Governmental and regulatory investigations have identified, secured, and utilized significant amounts of incriminating evidence from within the corporate Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Purposeful fraudulent activities aside, second-level effects are now beginning to trickle down into thousands of well run corporations that operate within highly regulated market sectors. For many, their only “questionable act” is a commitment to the deployment of technologies and business practices that promise to improve workforce productivity, client and supplier relationships, and shareholder return.

The challenges for corporate entities to address the issues is often one of trying to “herd cats.” The insatiable desire for technology that enables real-time communication, as well as immediate capabilities to develop and distribute information has created a huge information management quandary. Our ability to communicate and distribute information “at will” has created potential significant corporate risk associated with failure to adhere to governmental, industrial, or self-imposed corporate compliance metrics. Although much is in place to regulate previous generations of communication and information distribution methods, recent technological advances have seriously taxed the viability of many long-standing regulatory compliance standards. In response, new interpretations and amendments to these standards have been instituted, thus resulting in many of these same corporations having to react to put their “house in order.”

Defining the Challenge
Recent studies indicate that approximately 80% of all corporate information