One of the headline themes of our next webinar is ‘ESaaS’ – Enterprise Search as a Service.

Enterprise Search is software like Google, that you apply internally to search your own web sites and intranets, and hosting it as a Cloud service is therefore called ESaaS.

This is tremendously powerful software that can be used in a wide variety of different ways to drive business value.

For example for governments they can emulate how the Province of Ontario has used this type of software, to make their online web sites much more accessible to visitors, and specifically to create a ‘Service Location Finder‘.

This helps unify information from across multiple different agencies, making online service quicker and easier for citizens. For example searching for `Drivers Licence` will quickly link them to the relevant services such as applications and renewals.

Search services for EDaaS

Search can also be a component part of other solutions, for example ‘EDaaS’: E-Discovery as a Service, referring to applying IM (Information Management) best practices across Cloud providers, for example how to find records and apply legal holds to meet legislative compliance needs.

The specific requirements for this functionality is detailed in the recent Whitehouse best practice paper on buying this new mode of technology – Best Practices for Buying IT as a Service.

This is a white paper from CIO.gov that stipulates a best practice framework for buying services from Cloud Providers, covering a range of topics such as contracting, records management, compliance, legal, security, and so forth, so that agencies can be suitably diligent in procuring their first Cloud projects.

For example in this document it describes how Search is a key requirement to the process of finding legally required information by searching users mailboxes, email files etc., so that they can achieve compliance with FOIA requests (Freedom of Information Act).

Cloud solutions present possibilities for efficiencies in Federal agency abilities to do robust enterprise searches for records responsive to FOIA requests. If a Federal agency uses a CSP environment, an integrated centralized searching component would expand the ability to locate, de-duplicate, and index responsive records. It could also save tremendous amounts of time and reduce search and processing costs to requesters.

This describes the opportunity for hosters to leverage ESaaS as a value-add relevant to key sectors like Government.