Case Study - Optical Duplication to meet FSA regulations
Our client, a leading finance and insurance company, faced possible sanctions from the FSA (Financial Services Authority) when it was brought to their attention that the organisation only held 2 copies of client correspondence data. The data was held on Magneto Optical platters, and all in one location; presenting considerable risk to the organisation.
After liaising with the internal auditors, the IT operations department were tasked with resolving this issue to enhance IT security and ensure compliance with FSA regulations. In particular, the operations team leader owned the task - at which point he contacted eMag, who he knew had the capability to complete the task quickly and efficiently as he had been a customer of eMag's for some years.
The problem with Optical Platters
Back in the mid-1990s, in order to demonstrate compliance, business critical data was often held on optical platters due to its WORM (write once read many) properties. In addition to this, the optical platters boasted a one hundred year guarantee that the data would remain readable.
To meet FSA regulations back then, organisations needed to prove was that the data had not been altered throughout its lifecycle and so the optical platter was the ideal solution. In many cases only one copy of the business critical data was held in the primary business location. However, in the case we have outlined above, there were two copies of the data but risk was still present as both were held in the same location.
New legislation, new business requirements
In today's data centre, risk, quantity of data and legislation across all business sectors have prompted new and improved data management. In the case of the leading finance and insurance company discussed above, eMag duplicated all of the data held on the Magneto Optical platter in record time in addition to providing them with an alternative location to store this extra copy. This mitigates the risk to the business in the case of a site-wide disaster in their primary business location, ensures compliance with FSA regulations in addition to reducing the risk to the business, its clients and its reputation.
What other services do eMag offer to reduce risk, meet compliance requirements and ensure data integrity?
At eMag, we have unrivalled tape processing and data services capability, which will ensure you overcome the most complex of problems that you may face. Below are some of the services that we have provided for our customers in recent months - all of which will in one way or another reduce risk, meet internal or regulatory compliance requirements and ensure data availability in a crisis:
• An integrity check to satisfy audit requirements
• Conversion to a more appropriate platform, maybe to retire legacy hardware
• Migration to a different format to support different business applications
• Moving to a different media to reduce volumes and cut storage costs
• Retirement of legacy back-up systems and software
• Analysis to support e-discovery or litigation needs (should this be the reason that you need to determine the information content in the first place)
For more information read our archive/legacy data white paper that looks in depth at archive and legacy data - a key component in your data centre, if compliance requirements are to be met.