Relativity Trace is Relativity’s solution for communication surveillance. Its tagline “Detect misconduct before it escalates” is a good summary of its primary function – to identify communications which trigger alerts and concern about one or more individuals.

Proofpoint’s function is archiving, compliance and digital risk, with a cloud-based central repository of a wide range of content types, and a focus on people-centric security and compliance.

A new partnership between Relativity Trace and Proofpoint is designed to help customers manage surveillance data within a “single source of truth”. Relativity Trace will take data directly from the cloud-based Proofpoint Enterprise Archive so that all compliance data is available for analysis and review in one place. The press release is here.

I wanted to know more about this, and spoke to Jordan Domash, general manager of Relativity Trace at Relativity. The users, he said are either those charged directly with compliance with regulatory duties, or those responsible for managing a risk-based approach to get ahead of misconduct.

The primary regulatory requirement is the legal obligation to supervise employees, by identifying relevant populations, conducting appropriate surveillance (and acting on it), and then retaining information for whatever period is required by different regulations.

Usually, separate teams are responsible for surveillance and retention, and thence for discovery and allied purposes. Trace is good at picking the content which matters. Hitherto, Trace connects to all the relevant platforms in an organisation, pulling data from a range of sources. Once the Proofpoint integration is implemented, Trace will connect directly to Proofpoint, looking at a set of monitored individuals whatever platform they were using.

The “people-centric” approach used by Proofpoint allows users to identify, say, the 10,000 people who are to be monitored, by reference to their location, role or other characteristic. Every few minutes, Trace will search all the data and pull it into Trace, and subject it to Relativity’s advanced AI before putting it into Relativity.

It will sit in Relativity for a defined period for surveillance review and to give it some context. It may, of course, stay there or come back into Relativity if required for litigation or for an investigation.

The integrated solution will be available to joint customers in late Spring of 2021. Meanwhile, we can expect further Relativity and Relativity Trace news to be released around Relativity Fest London taking place this week.