Use Cases For AsterionDB
Here are some of the use cases we are working on at AsterionDB. Remember, AsterionDB is a horizontally aligned solution and that allows us to address a wide range of problems.
Table of Contents
Banking and Financial Institutions
Securely store and manage ATM & building security videos, checks and signature images as well as financial contracts.
AsterionDB is a key technology partner to the banking and financial industries in helping to solve the cybersecurity and data management problems they face. We can help with issues such as video feeds, image archive and retrieval and document management. Here are a few examples.
Video Footage
Video cameras are everywhere in today’s society – not just on your local ATM machine. With AsterionDB’s extensible architecture advanced technologies such as facial recognition can be built directly into database logic. This allows for enhanced security measures to be employed at many points in the financial and banking life cycle. AsterionDB makes it easier to enhance application functionality to include facial recognition during the customer validation process, react to possible identify theft situations and more efficiently respond to Law Enforcement and Legal requests.
Images of Checks and Signatures
More and more of our daily financial transactions are taking place online without the need for traditional customer interaction. Much of this is accomplished with camera enabled smartphones that are used to record deposited checks. AsterionDB helps in this regard by not only storing the check images but also enabling optical character recognition capabilities directly in the database. As with the case of video feeds this allows for a more timely validation of credentials. Over time, the asynchronous processing of signatures can build a ML knowledge base that continually increases the deterministic quality of the validation process leader to faster determination of possible identity theft incidents.
Financial Contract Management
Finance and complex purchase agreements see an increasing number of associated documents included each year. In many cases, these documents must be filled out in hard copy and retained in both physical and digital forms. This places an increasing burden upon institutions to manage documents that must be maintained in association with the originating transaction for the entire lifetime of the agreement and beyond.
The need to scan physical documents and ensure that the association between the hard copy and a digital rendition is of critical importance. AsterionDB helps here by making it easy to ensure that this association remains unbroken.
Many system architects have faced issues of maintaining access to millions of documents stored in the file system. The impact incurred when the inevitable reorganization of the hierarchical file structure includes duplicated work, duplicated data, lost data and increased operational expense.
With AsterionDB, you don’t have to organize millions of documents into a hierarchical structure. Many have confronted the problems that ensue when too many files are stored within a single subdirectory. AsterionDB uses static object ID’s and a human readable file location is optional. In fact, taking advantage of the database’s ability to manage millions of rows, AsterionDB is a perfect answer to the file system’s limitations.
AsterionDB can also be configured to age documents out of active use and into less expensive storage as it becomes archived.
Media Asset Backup and Restore
Concurrent with the trend among institutions to store an increasing number of media assets, from check images to video footage, a need arises to provide rapid backup and restore capabilities.
We are all familiar with the burden of backing up files. When the number of files to be backed up, however, numbers in the millions, and these files must retain strict correlation to structured data elements, the burden of managing this task becomes enormous. In addition, the impact is compounded by the transactional effect of having to access millions of files for backup and restore.
AsterionDB can help in this regard by being an elastic, easily managed backup and restore service that can be quickly integrated into existing financial application workflows.
Courts & Law
The legacy file system can not answer the legal community’s rich tagging, search and indexing requirements.
Searching Content
AsterionDB’s extensible features allows it to understand complex document types such as PDFs and spreadsheets. This allows AsterionDB to analyze and harvest desired information from unstructured content.
AsterionDB can be used to dynamically search through electronic evidence based on specific analytical demands. Extracted references to desired information can be fed into third-party ML/AI packages or incorporated directly into AsterionDB’s keyword and tagging mechanisms.
De-Duplication
We are all familiar with the sprawl that takes place when we store documents and other content items. Consider the problem then when you have multiple people storing content and keeping multiple copies of the same document.
AsterionDB, coupled with Oracle’s BLOB de-duplication features, is an ideal solution to this problem. You may have a situation where the same content is stored by multiple users, each with their own unique filename and path. With AsterionDB, multiple users of the system are able to keep content that resolves down to the same bits while still maintaining their own ‘pathway’ to the data as expressed by keywords and tags.
Rich Keyword Tagging
AsterionDB has a built in keyword and tagging features based around the concept of a keyword group. Keyword groups represent AsterionDB’s modern take on subdirectories. Keyword groups allow us to aggregate common keywords by task or object type. The keywords are also user defined and can have values that are restricted by type (e.g. character, date, integer).
Cross Indexing and Searching
One of the most vexing limitations of the file system is the inability to easily create multiple references to the same content. While symbolic links are useful, they do not fully satisfy the requirement for flexibility in how data is indexed.
For example, legal documents and evidentiary items often pertain to multiple clients, witnesses or suspects. It is difficult to express these tagging requirements using the limited capabilities of the hierarchical file system. In contrast, AsterionDB’s keyword/tagging mechanism makes it easy to make these kind of associations by merely applying multiple tags to an object.
Following upon this feature is the necessary ability to easily search by multiple access paths for information. With AsterionDB, it is easy to construct a query that asks the question “Show me all email documents that pertain to person A and person B’
Evidence Curation – Knowledge Base
Modern legal proceedings frequently include evidence in multiple forms from text and PDFs to recorded video and images. Unlike document management systems, AsterionDB takes the same approach to any unstructured data type. This allows for the easy construction of evidentiary vaults of information that contain all required media types.
Of extreme value is AsterionDB’s ability to rapidly query information based on the dynamic, real-time indexing requirements of a live courtroom proceeding.
On Demand Cloud Based Access
AsterionDB presents the same footprint in cloud an on premises situations. This makes it an easy task to take locally curated information and post it to the cloud for use in courtroom scenarios. Lawyers are no longer limited to the information that may or may not be loaded onto their laptop computer. In the alternative, they can rely upon a single source of truth for information that is always up to date.
Live courtroom proceedings are a very demanding and dynamic environment. AsterionDB’s common footprint in the cloud and on premises means there is not discontinuity in how legal professionals use the technology.
Healthcare
Simplify your HIPAA compliance tasks by migrating medical images and records into a secure, zero-trust storage architecture.
The Perfect Solution for Medical Records & Images
AsterionDB’s zero-trust, secure by design architecture makes it a perfect fit for medial records and images. HIPAA and GDPR requirements, and more importantly the fines for non-compliance, makes it imperative to find the most secure solutions available.
No Network or File System Discovery
One of the ways that hackers, viruses and ransomware work is to take advantage of the ability to discover assets in the network or file system. By scanning folders and shared drives attackers are able to map your network.
AsterionDB prevents this by presenting an architecture that precludes network discovery and file system browsing. It’s easy to understand. AsterionDB moves these valuable assets out of the insecure legacy file system into the Oracle Database. We extend the already proven security capabilities of the database to protect any type of medical record or image.
Encapsulation of Varied Medical Record Types
One of the most important features that any Electronic Medical Records system must provide is the assurance that structured data, which represents vital patient information, is not detached from unstructured data such as DICOM images, scanned documents, X-rays, MRI’s etc.
AsterionDB is the only system that fully conjoins structured and unstructured data in the database. This means that a single export of your database contains all of the structured patient information as well as the referenced unstructured data.
In contrast, other systems require the coordination and tracking of separate backup operations: one for structured data, the other for unstructured data. This problem is compounded further when information needs to be transmitted between locations or restored from backup. It is all to easy for these individual backups to be out of sync or available on separate timelines.
Cloud Migration
AsterionDB makes the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure an attractive and comprehensive solution for storing and retrieving medical information. AsterionDB comes with tools, patterns and techniques that allow for the easy migration of unstructured data from on premises installation into the cloud.
Unlike most solutions, AsterionDB can support the direct ingestion of unstructured data from on premises resources directly into an Oracle database in the cloud.
AsterionDB also supports the Oracle Autonomous Database which makes it trivially simple to implement a fault tolerant, replicated system that is available 24/7.
Enable Support for DICOM Images
AsterionDB is an extensible architecture. This allows it to adapt to any unstructured data type and understand its format. We leverage this capability to enable DICOM support in the database. If you are an Oracle user with current or future DICOM requirements, AsterionDB is your vendor of choice to provide this capability.
Oracle recommends that users of Oracle DICOM migrate to a platform that uses Oracle SecureFiles technology to store the data within the database. That is the exact approach taken by AsterionDB.
AsterionDB’s DICOM-PACS server (scheduled for March 2022 release) will support any standard PACS viewer.
Metadata Extraction
Today’s applications frequently have requirements to integrate unstructured and big data. Often, this data is managed by extracting metadata, data that describes data, from the unstructured digital assets. This allows for easy searching indexing, cataloging, etc.
Problems can arise when one considers the burdensome task of managing, securing, and synchronizing metadata and the original source data. This problem is only compounded by the fact that the metadata and the original source is often stored in different systems.
With AsterionDB’s advanced capabilities, not only can we directly integrate any metadata extraction logic but we also conjoin the storage of metadata and the information it references – all within a unified, advanced Oracle data-type. This ensures that the metadata and the data it refers to always travel together!
OAuth Integration
OAuth is an internet technology used by many companies (e.g. Google, Amazon, Facebook) to grant applications access to cloud services such as email, object storage, profile information etc.
The AsterionDB OAuth Database Plugin makes it easy to integrate OAuth capabilities into your applications. Through functions available in PL/SQL, programmers can grant access to specific scopes that define and regulate the authorized capabilities.
AsterionDB uses this capability internally to enable integration to Google’s SMTP Email Server.
Optical Character Recognition
Mining unstructured data for useful information is one of the most valuable benefits of directly managing digital assets. A familiar example of this is scanning a document with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. For example, you may have scanned documents with useful information that you would like to incorporate into your application.
With AsterionDB’s advanced architecture, we can provide a database plugin to any popular OCR software that will allow you to extract the information you desire. OCR functions will allow you to harvest specific information from scanned forms and it can also allow you to evaluate scanned documents for particular words of interest. As with all of AsterionDB’s plugin-based products, you will be able to directly incorporate OCR functions within your PL/SQL code in the database. This allows the creation of data-layer services that can satisfy the OCR requirements of any client application.
Outbound SMTP Email Support
AsterionDB is integrated with Google’s Gmail service. This allows the AsterionDB platform to send invitations, notifications, password reset instructions, and so forth.
AsterionDB’s Email architecture is available by extension to applications that are integrated into the AsterionDB Converged Computing Platform.
This allows the extension of outbound email capabilities in order to support the specific requirements of your application.
Other SMTP Email service providers can be supported as well.