Financial services is an especially data-intensive and heavily regulated industry. Both the NASD and the SEC have implemented regulations requiring the retention of all inbound, outbound, and internal electronic communications, including emails and other electronically stored information. Publicly traded companies must also comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002, which requires the retention of electronic communication records in an immutable format for up to 7 years. Immediate access to these records, including emails, attachments, system files, and others, is also required for compliance.

Because of the increasing proportion of content that is sent and received electronically in emails, in attachments, and in other types of communications/formats, financial services firms must deploy archiving systems that can index all relevant content, place this content into archival storage, and provide the ability to search for content on demand. A failure to implement appropriate archiving technology can result in significant financial penalties, as well as legal sanctions, loss of corporate reputation, and other negative consequences.

As described below, ArcMail archiving solutions are an important tool in helping our financial services customers address these needs/issues.

Provide Comprehensive Compliance Support: IT policies are a critical component of compliance and eDiscovery in the financial services industry. Working off the company’s established data management best practices and email use policies, ArcMail archiving solutions help the organization meet compliance requirements and enable rapid, simple eDiscovery. By archiving email, attachments, calendar files, MS SharePoint, system files, and other electronic data to a secure repository, our customers ensure compliance, bolster investor and customer security and confidence, and significantly reduce the likelihood of multi-million dollar fines and the accompanying negative exposure.

Ensure Reliable Recording and Enable Granular Retention Rules:  ArcMail archiving solutions securely store all of the organization’s electronic communications and files (email, attachments, system files, social media posts, and other data) for an unlimited amount of time.  Once installed, ArcMail archiving solutions automate the company’s retention policy to facilitate internal controls. ArcMail’s granular retention policy settings allow the archive administrator to set different policies for entire locations or departments, or to tailor retention policy to every user.

Our archiving solutions also include granular filtering criteria, which can be set to avoid filling the archive with personal or junk mail. However, to ensure total email compliance, ArcMail archiving uses a real-time journaling process that captures all inbound, outbound, and internal messages as soon as they hit the mail server, thus ensuring no emails are ever accidentally deleted before they can be archived. No one, not even the administrator, has the ability to delete or modify data from within the archive. The only way to remove an email is to alter its retention policy.  Whenever a change is made to the archive, an audit trail is logged with the user, date, time, and specific change made.

Ensure Permission-based Control:  ArcMail archiving solutions ensure access control through permission-based access — only those fully authorized can search and retrieve specific documents. The archive administrator can customize user access and search capabilities by individual, group, department, team, etc. Our solutions maintain a log of all archiving processes, along with all users’ search and retrieval activities. These capabilities mitigate the risk and occurrence of fraudulent activities.

Facilitate eDiscovery Process: When requests for records come in, ArcMail archiving solutions enable critical data to be located and restored well ahead of eDiscovery deadlines. Our superior indexing technology and our organized back-end database structure allow the user to search through millions of unstructured messages or files to retrieve results within seconds. While our search function is easy to use, it is by no means unsophisticated. Users can search by message or file content using full-text keywords, key phrases, and proximity. Users also have the option to search by message metadata, such as file type, date, sender, recipient(s), file size, and more. If the initial results are too broad, users can search within the results to pare down to exactly what is needed. Once the archive administrator gives the legal team permission to search the archive, the archive’s intuitive interface enables the team to start searching immediately – in other words, no archive “classes” are required. ArcMail’s archiving solutions are known for their ease of use, providing options for both simple searches and highly-detailed Boolean searches, with no technical jargon and well-labeled search criteria. Searching the ArcMail archive is as simple as performing a Google search, and can be done either directly from within MS Outlook or from a web-based UI.

Archive users can save their searches to “Search Baskets” for later perusal or to share with others. Saved searches make it quick and easy to conduct multiple searches while still being able to customize terms. ArcMail archiving solutions maintain data in its original format for auditing and litigation purposes.  

Key ArcMail Features Benefiting Financial Services Organizations:

• Indexing of every single word of every document, email, attachment, and other electronically stored document, and collection of all metadata and content in preparation for search and discovery
• High compression rates and single-instance storage to slow storage growth
• Identification and storage of documents, emails, and attachments for any period of time
• De-duplication of files, messages, attachments, and other content that share the same commonality
• Retrieval of only targeted content to find and extract documents quickly and efficiently
• Granular retention capability and archive access options allowing customization/tailoring down to the individual user level
• Data immutability such that data cannot be deleted or modified from its original state
• Archived document creation and integrity authentication
• Permission-based access such that only those fully authorized can search and retrieve specific documents
• Reliable backup and redundancy
• Audit trail to monitor data retention and destruction within the archive