Backup, recovery and archive technologies underpin an organization’s ability to maintain data availability, achieve compliance goals and successfully implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

Being compliant to regulations concerning electronic records is an increasingly serious challenge for businesses of all sizes. But it's a special distraction and economic burden for smaller businesses.

In particular, meeting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) strict regulations for email retention and availability is a major concern today for small broker-dealers and other financial services organizations, including investment advisors.

It is critical for organizations (especially publicly traded companies) to ensure that data is retained and accessible when necessary, particularly from a legal discovery perspective. New regulations mandate that companies retain data for long periods of time. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley imposes a seven-year retention period on certain financial records for public companies and their accounting and auditing teams. SEC 17a-4 of the Act requires financial services firms to retain email and instant messaging records for a minimum of six years.

The integrity of retained data is a critical requirement for a number of regulations. These regulations require that data that must be retained cannot be altered or erased until the retention period expires. The Act holds top executives personally responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of their company’s financial data — under threat of criminal prosecution.

Specifically, the SEC, NYSE, and NASD regulations include such requirements as:

• Emails and attachments must be preserved in a non-alterable, non-rewritable, non- erasable format.
• The company must be able to automatically verify the quality and accuracy of the archiving process
• Emails must be fully indexed and searchable
• All emails must be preserved for up to seven years, and in an accessible place for the first two years
• When emails are requested by the regulatory bodies, the stated retrieval time is "immediate"