SOX | Compliant Archiving

Compliant Archiving staying compliant in an increasingly regulated world

12Nov/09

What Is Compliant Archiving?

An archive is a collection of organizational records that have been created during the course of time and have been stored for permanent or long-term preservation. Such data is accessed infrequently and its content does not change. Companies must preserve it, however, for a various reasons, including system failure or disaster recovery. A great deal of archiving is done out of necessity to meet a wide variety of government regulations, from the SEC, FINRA and FRCP to HIPAA and SOX. This type of central preservation is referred to as compliant archiving.

Companies facing compliance regulations have a variety of archiving products to choose from. The challenge is to find the solution that best suits your organization. Regardless of the specific need, combining software and hardware with a thoughtful retention policy for archiving is vital for industries that face compliance regulations.

A good archiving strategy can actually reduce the overall cost of storing data. Compliant archiving should do all of the following:

  • Protect archived data from those not authorized to view it;
  • Make it easily accessible for those with permission to do so;
  • Include disaster recovery plans.

Beyond being compliant, cost-effective archiving strategies also include the following elements:

  • Offer reliability, availability, connectivity and serviceability features that enable effective information life-cycle management;
  • Enable quick and affordable archiving capacity increases;
  • Minimize power and data center rack usage.

Because of the complexity and mission-critical nature of the data, it is vital to find a reliable archiving partner for your compliant needs. Do the research and choose wisely.