Compliance

Top 10 Considerations When Selecting an Enterprise Archive Platform

August 20, 2024by Smarsh

Choosing the right digital communication archive is critical for financial organizations’ continued success. Organizations are making archiving solution decisions with an eye toward the future, ensuring that their investment in a new archive meets their data and regulatory requirements today and tomorrow.

Before investing in a new communication archive solution, consider these critical capabilities:

#1: Performance

There is a good reason why performance sits at the top of the list. The volume of communications data that financial firms are required to archive has grown 28% in the last year alone. As this exponential growth continues, your enterprise archiving solution must be able to meet this increased demand without impacting performance. Ensure your archiving solution matches your needs for ingesting, searching, and exporting data. Look for a solution that can provide search results in real-time and timely data exports to meet the needs of the business and regulators.

#2: Content capture and preservation

The archive solution must support a variety of communication channels and content types, such as text, chat, and voice, and respond quickly to new communication channels as the business requires. The system should also be able to capture and preserve content in its native format with full context, including metadata such as joins, leaves, edits, deletes and comments.

#3: Cloud-native technology

Validate that the solution is a true cloud-native application that can be deployed on AWS, Azure, or any other leading cloud infrastructures. Ensure the archive solution can deploy on multiple cloud infrastructures – separately or simultaneously – with a seamless, flexible approach.

#4: Data security

Data protection is vital to your organization’s reputation and the trust of its customers. Look for a solution that goes beyond the security provided by infrastructure vendors, one that employs a zero-trust data model and object-level encryption to ensure no one outside your organization can access your data. Look for role-based access control and a solution that can demonstrate third-party certifications and attestations.

#5: Scalability

Do not settle for a one-size-fits-all approach to communications archiving. A solution worthy of investment must be able to scale up or down to meet the evolving needs of the business and changing regulatory requirements.

#6: Resiliency

An archive solution is only an asset for your organization when it’s available. Look for a solution that can offer 99.99% uptime of its archive solution. Cloud-native technology provides an opportunity for added capabilities, such as triple-active availability, which maintains three exact copies of your communication archive and the highest level of resiliency available today. Why settle for less?

#7: Data ownership

Ensure you have access to your data when and where you need it. Look for a solution that does not charge for data extractions or e-discovery searches. Unabated access to your data is essential when timely responses are required. Unexpected expenses can wreak havoc on any budget.

#8: Openness and flexibility

The archive solution must be able to act as a central point of control for unstructured content and integrate with other applications, such as legal document review, content surveillance, or business intelligence.

#9: Total cost of ownership

Communication data storage costs continue to rise. Financial organizations now capture and monitor an average of over ten communication channels. Invest in a solution that effectively archives and manages communications data to meet mandated and business-driven policies while keeping costs down. A solution that can implement a customized data tiering data management model can help you control expenses.

#10: AI and a vision for the future

Ensure the archive solution you choose is purpose-built to meet the future needs of your organization. As AI becomes an integral part of many organizations’ growth strategies, it’s important to choose a partner that can help you build on your archive investment to develop AI-powered communication intelligence solutions. These solutions will help you gain valuable business insights, drive efficiencies, and contribute to your growth strategy through AI and other innovations.

Bonus #11: Choose a trusted partner

The archive is just one part of an organization’s communication compliance strategy. You are investing not only in the technology solution but also a partner that provides the technology and expertise to help you turn a regulatory requirement into a competitive advantage.

A cloud-native, context-aware, extensible archive for global enterprises with complex security, data privacy and regulatory requirements.

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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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