Written by a human
Data archives are an essential component for almost all organizations worldwide. Whether you’re a financial services firm, a government body, or a company specializing in life sciences – all have unique and essential needs to capture, store, and access data.
For financial services archiving, meeting recordkeeping requirements is essential – alongside data privacy and security.
For healthcare data archiving, the cost of compliance is a prominent challenge in a sea of off-label marketing and sensitive data obligations. With rising medicine and machinery costs, compliance a lower priority in the budget.
And finally, government archiving is burdened with regulatory complexities, including storage, analytics, and reporting tasks which – though essential for accountability and investigations – often fall outside of business-as-usual workflows. This can create tech integration nightmares, especially when contending with legacy systems.
Without specific and tailored archiving solutions, companies will continue to struggle to address their industry-specific needs and face the onslaught of enforcement actions. Can you continue to operate at risk of fines, audits, and delays?
Why does industry-specific archiving matter?
Industry-specific archiving refers to technology solutions that enable firms to customize their data capture and storage abilities to follow certain, bespoke rules. Requirements are different and depend on the industry you’re in, so firms should be able to tailor their archiving solution to their own situation.
For example, FINRA Rule 3110 requires firms to “design a supervisory system that is ‘reasonably designed’ to achieve compliance with applicable regulations”. SEC Rule 17-a4 similarly sets out stringent recordkeeping rules. Records must be accurately stored for a period of at least three years, and must be inspected on at least an annual basis.
Under HIPAA, all US healthcare providers must archive emails that contain sensitive personally identifiable information for a period of six years, as well as implement access controls and disaster recovery plans.
And data protection requirements including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and others place far-reaching requirements on all organizations to edit and delete data at the subject’s request.
Clearly, each of these cases requires different programming requirements for data collecting and archiving solutions, which is why industry-specific archiving is critical.
Challenges in cross-industry archiving
Data silos
Attempting to capture diverse types of data can be painful, particularly for analysis and reporting. When different data types are collected, they’re often formatted completely uniquely from each other.
This means that getting the full picture requires data to not only be captured and stored, but uniformly structured and enriched so as to be useful, searchable, and auditable in the event of investigation.
Security
Strict security measures are in place across all sectors, but they are not the same. For companies operating across healthcare, finance, and law, for example, data must be kept separate and treated according to the specific regulations of that sector. As geopolitical events unfold, data is a commodity that is increasingly weaponized. Data security is essential to risk mitigation and to prevent sensitive information falling into the wrong hands.
Internal Controls
Internal controls and best practices also vary from sector to sector, with suspicious activity flagging in finance, for example, while government professionals must deal with surprise audits and litigation relating to their eDiscovery, while ensuring only the relevant data is shared. Organizations must ensure they have a clear and well-distributed policy regarding information – which should be shared and tested frequently to ensure internal compliance. Individuals should feel empowered to understand their responsibility regarding different types of data, and know what to do in the event of an outage or breach.
Non-compliance and disappearing messages
And then there are the risks of non-compliance. No matter which industry you’re operating in, failure to comply with relevant regulations is likely to lead to fines, suspensions, and reputational damage.
A notable example within the finance industry includes FINRA’s $250,000 fine to a member firm for failure to preserve over 1.25 million electronic communications, the “vast majority of which” were marketing emails.
At a governmental level, the U.K. government faced intense public scrutiny for its use of ephemeral messages on WhatsApp which meant that, during an inquiry into the government’s handing of COVID-19, crucial evidence was missing.
Benefits of having industry-specific archiving
It’s clear that the solution to each of these challenges is to work with industry-specific archiving, which can meet the demands of individual sector requirements and help teams comply with confidence.
Here are some of the benefits:
- Auditable archives provide a timeline of actions and end-to-end reconstruction of conversations
- Streamlined platforms for tailored eDiscovery
- Secure and ongoing archiving can build good relationships with the regulators
- Data archives ensure data completeness and integrity – with added layers of operational efficiency and security
Auditable archives
When a data archive solution is tailor-made for a specific industry, it’s preset to meet the requirements of that industry. This means that the data that’s collected can be automatically processed into the right format, making it easy for auditors to search and scan as needed.
For example, Global Relay Archive prevents data from being tampered or edited after capture, following the write once, read many (WORM) protocol.
Streamlining
A targeted archiving solution can enhance many of the processes you’re undergoing on a daily or weekly basis, driving efficiency within the business.
For example, legal professionals can use Global Relay’s eDiscovery suite to put their cases together quickly, with help from AI to find the right documents when they’re needed. The platform assesses documents efficiently by using a combination of embedded analytics, visualizations, and AI models to spot patterns, detect anomalies, and quickly drill down to relevant information.
Legal archiving solutions provide huge operational benefits, making the eDiscovery process quicker, and reducing human resource costs for otherwise manual work.
Secure, ongoing monitoring
Data archiving solutions that are aimed at just a single industry can keep data more secure, due to focused expertise, specialized security measures, and adherence to industry-specific regulations.
Make headway with the regulators knowing it’s all done for you by a provider that solely exists to keep your data safe, like Global Relay.
Sure, you could try to build it yourself, but internal development requires a big budget, years of trial and error, and complex stakeholder management. By storing data offsite in secure premises, you can reduce the risks when cybercriminals target your data.
Opt for a personalized over a generic data archiving solution
Each industry has an absolute need for a specific data archiving solution to match regulations and avoid penalties.
For some, data security is the critical focus. For financial services, recordkeeping requirements dominate archiving decisions. Under healthcare data archiving and supervision rules, companies may need to focus on complex compliance patient record requirements. And in the legal profession, getting to the right document within eDiscovery quickly is the priority. That’s only the tip of the iceberg!
To learn more about how Global Relay’s data archiving solution can be tailored to your business needs, get in touch with our team for a demo.