Archiving & Capture Tech Trends

5 Don’ts When Choosing Your Next Archive

February 21, 2025by Smarsh

Purchasing an archive today is not as straightforward as it was 15 years ago. What’s changed, you might ask? Well, data. It's become incredibly valuable. Plus, it’s outpaced old technologies, growing at an explosive rate and a velocity that is hard to keep up with. Now, it's not just about retaining and accessing data, but also analyzing, indexing, searching, automating, gaining insights, and enriching it. And, of course, it must be secure, resilient, and scalable to keep up with your business.

Why it matters

The need for proper data storage is both inevitable and necessary for regulated businesses. Financial services firms need to choose a purpose-built archive to meet ever-changing regulatory demands.

Don't get stuck with yesterday's technologies. Here's five big don’ts when choosing your next archive. 

1. Don't risk efficiency, as time is money

Your archive should offer exceptional search and accessibility performance. Check if it can handle any type of data for storage, search, and export. Consider how quickly you can retrieve data from the archive. Today, context-aware archiving is vital. This means preserving content, metadata, and event-based information in its native format. This allows you to thread events, providing true context-aware archiving, which is especially important for interactive conversations and popular collaboration platforms. When you must review millions of data points, the math is simple time and resource savings.

2. Don't risk scalability, as data is exploding

To handle high volumes of data, your archive must be scalable. It should be able to process petabyte-scale data without sacrificing speed, exporting millions of records per second. A wise investment is an archive built with cloud-native architecture design and elastic compute resources that can grow with your enterprise needs.

3. Don't risk security, as your archive must be resilient

Its value demands it is impenetrable. This means more than just meeting SEC requirements for WORM and storing data in immutable format. It also means meeting strict SLAs and uptime requirements. Your archive should encrypt data both in-transit and at-rest, provide role-based access controls, and allow you to bring your own key. The data in the archive must also have four 9s availability. One way to achieve this is through "triple-active" deployment, which runs three availability zones simultaneously. This approach eliminates the need for traditional disaster recovery sites and reduces recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) to near zero.

4. Don’t risk integration, as your archive must be able to work with downstream processes

If your archive can’t integrate with other tools in your workflows, it will disrupt critical business functions, wasting time and money. Your archive should be able to enrich, index, and store data in context, with APIs for export and integration with other tools. This enables seamless integration with other enterprise applications, third-party review products, and business intelligence tools. No more manual processes!

5. Don’t assume all data is equal, it will cost you! 

There are significant costs to storing data. Implementing an archive with intelligent data tiering for data lifecycle management saves time and money by storing only necessary data on expensive storage space. With tools like granular retention policies and a policy engine that allows you to quickly search data based on its depth or age, you save valuable time and increase efficiency.

Don’t just take our word for it

We believe our value as a leader is emphasized in the work we do for our customers and our dedication to staying ahead of regulatory and technological demands. Forrester recently published a Smarsh-commissioned Total Economic Impact Study, which dives into how Smarsh customers have achieved and exceeded their goals. See for yourself what Smarsh can do.

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Smarsh

Smarsh® is the recognized global leader in electronic communications archiving solutions for regulated organizations. Smarsh provides innovative capture, archiving, e-discovery, and supervision solutions across the industry’s widest breadth of communication channels.

Scalable for organizations of all sizes, the Smarsh platform provides customers with compliance built on confidence. It enables them to strategically future-proof as new communication channels are adopted, and to realize more insight and value from the data in their archive. Customers strengthen their compliance and e-discovery initiatives and benefit from the productive use of email, social media, mobile/text messaging, instant messaging and collaboration, web, and voice channels.

Smarsh serves a global client base that spans the top banks in North America and Europe, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors. Smarsh also enables state and local government agencies to meet their public records and e-discovery requirements. For more information, visit www.smarsh.com.

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