AdvisorVault Adds Compliance to Cloud Storage

AdvisorVault, a remote backup provider designated to small financial firms, now protects customer data in the cloud. This ensures firms who are members of FINRA regulated by the SEC meet the data retention requirements of 17a-3 and 17a-4.
      
This ensures firms who are members of FINRA regulated by the SEC meet all the data compliance regulation such as the long-term retention and supervisory rules contained in 17a-3 and 17a-4.

"Very often firms are using cloud providers to store critical data and communications, but these services are not actually storing this information in a compliant format," said Allan Lonz, President of AdvisorVault. "But that’s not the biggest problem; firms are not able to easily review this data and make is readily available to regulators during an audit," added Lonz.

Although using a cloud provider has benefits, especially for small firms, it has opened the door to other risk, and financial firms must be sure to add an additional level of compliance. Most cloud providers really don’t understand the specific data compliance requirements, especially for broker-dealers, investment advisors and wealth management companies. However, it is a simply process to ensure this level of compliance is maintained – and cloud providers are more than happy to work with compliance vendor to ensure these rules are met for their customers.

How to add Compliancy to the Cloud:
Despite the complexity of today’s compliance rules, the same basic policies apply even if the data is stored in the cloud. Although moving data to the cloud certainly solves the disaster recovery requirements and reduces the IT management burden, three concerns remain:

• The long-term retention of data stored in the cloud;
• The supervision and retrieval of this data;
• Designated Third Party (D3P) requirements.

To accomplish these additional demands a process has to be added to ensure these three requirements are met. They key is finding one provider who can easily plug-in to the data resided in the cloud and transferred it to a secondary compliant infrastructure to ensure audits are passed with success. But most importantly firms will be confident that they are maintaining the highest level of customer confidence at all times.