You Store More and More Data. Can You Find It?
March 8, 2010
Storing data is nothing new for securities firms. In many operations, every action of every executive and staffer, from business transactions to phone calls to emails, is recorded and stored electronically. In the digital era, it's become common practice, a sign of good business management.
But, with the onslaught of high-profile media cases and new regulations handed down from the Securities and Exchange Commission and other government agencies, the issue is not keeping that data "somewhere."
The real issue is retrieving the data, when needed. From the cloud. From servers. From cassettes. Even from cabinets.
Quickly.
"With the regulatory and compliance initiatives coming up now increasingly, financial firms and a lot of corporations have the mindset that they have to keep everything and store it. However, when you do that, you're not necessarily thinking about how you're going to get it out later,'' said Katey Wood, an analyst who covers the process called e- discovery for research firm 451 Group. "You just want to make sure it's there if you need it."
For example, any time there's a lawsuit your securities firm is going to have to produce all of its relevant electronically-stored information that's related to the case. "There are really tight timeframes around that and tough sanctions if you don't comply with them," Wood says. "Therefore, companies want to be able to gather up their information quickly and determine what's relevant."
One of the biggest problems when it comes to data retrieval is precision, sifting through loads of different kinds of data in order to find information related to one single subject. The data may be in different formats, on tapes on shelves or "sitting loose" in a Microsoft SharePoint archive, online, Wood notes.
"That's one of the challenges of getting stuff out of an archive or compliance or regulatory system-figuring out what your goal is and getting through all these massive tons of data," explained Wood. "There are all of these different repositories in an archive in a corporation and a lot of times they aren't unified with some kind of search system."
Companies such as San Francisco-based enterprise infrastructure software provider Autonomy Zantaz have tried to address this issue and help firms improve their data retrieval process.
The biggest problem is unstructured data. This is information that doesn't exist in columns and rows in databases but rather in documents, emails and audio, "where the data itself is not described" digitally in a way that makes retrieval easy, said George Tziahanas, vice president of compliance at Autonomy Zantaz.
Banks, broker dealers and the like are under all types of requirements to save books, records and other operating information for a long time. But now, those requirements have been extended to include more and more electronic information such as email, instant messages, and even postings on social networks, under new guidance from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, explained Tziahanas.
"The question then becomes, 'Why are you storing this?'," he said. The answer is 'for very specific reasons,' such as the regulators wanting to look at it at some point, or because the firm is going to get hit with a lawsuit, which means the data will have to be produced. That gets to access technology, which gives you the ability to go in and access all kinds of information of different types in different places, understand what it is, what matters and produce it."
