AdvisorVault Adds Compliance to the Cloud

March 2, 2011 - PRLog -- AdvisorVault, the only 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 can use cloud services and still 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,  a remote backup provider specializing in small financial firms, “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 huge benefits, especially for small firms, it has opened the door to other serious risks, 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 simple 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 Compliance 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, either electronic records, or emails and transfer  this data to a secondary compliant infrastructure to ensure audits are passed with success. But most importantly, The process must run automatically and provide compliance officers with the ability to easily access and review this data from a centralized secure web interface, this way firms will be confident that they are maintaining the highest level of customer confidence at all times by always satisfying FINRA and SEC supervisory rules upon request..

About AdvisorVault:

AdvisorVault, http://www.advisorvault.org, is the only remote backup provider specifically designed to help small broker-dealer firms achieve today’s stringent data compliance requirements. With our designated third-party status (D3P) we help small firms achieve all the required data compliance rules defined in 17a-3 & 17a-4, as well as the supervisory and disaster recovery demands contained in FINRA rules 3510 and 3010.

Contact AdvisorVault and learn more about our compliant solution for data stored in the cloud.

AdvisorVault contact:
Allan Lonz, President and CEO
alonz@advisorvault.org
Direct: 416-985-0310
Toll Free: 1-866-925-1941
http://www.advisorvault.org

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AdvisorVault - A FINRA designated storage provider that helps small broker-dealer firms achieve the requirements of 17a-3 & 17a-4, simply and inexpensively. The TURNKEY solution includes secure remote backup, long-term archiving and disaster recovery.