Email Archiving Vendor Smarsh Provides Gmail for Business Compliance Solution

Portland, Ore., December 8, 2009 - Smarsh®, the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, announced today that it provides email archiving and compliance support for companies using the Google Apps Premier Edition. Organizations governed by SEC 17a-4 and other SEC and FINRA email compliance mandates can now meet compliance obligations with confidence while leveraging Google Apps for their email hosting needs.

"As businesses evaluate any and all email options, from Google Apps to Microsoft Exchange 2010, compliance considerations must be factored into the decision-making process," said Smarsh founder and CEO Stephen Marsh. "In reality, an archiving function doesn’t automatically mean compliance. We have tailored our archiving solution to fill this compliance gap for thousands of investment advisers and broker-dealers to provide them assurance that they are meeting SEC and FINRA requirements in a secure hosted environment, regardless of the email platform they choose.

San Francisco-based Artience Capital Management, a recently independent registered investment adviser firm, chose Google Apps to support its newly-formed company, but needed to complement the email service with a solution specifically designed to address its SEC email compliance obligations.

"Several email archiving vendors I contacted, including Google Postini, either had feature sets that didn’t meet all the specific SEC compliance criteria or integration limitations," said Nik Wekwerth, Artience COO. "I recognized Smarsh was a service provider with email compliance expertise that could archive our Gmail immediately and help 'future-proof' our compliance efforts. The setup was straightforward, their support staff made the process easy, and most importantly, we have the system in place to satisfy our compliance needs."

Achieving Email Compliance

Smarsh's unique hosted architecture easily facilitates technical integration with on-premise and SaaS (software-as-a-service) email hosting platforms. In addition, Smarsh offers technical functionality and service features not standard in most archiving solutions, satisfying email compliance requirements for SEC 17a-4 and 204-2, FINRA rules 3010 and 3110, and other regulatory requirements, including:

1. Writing archived email to a "non-rewritable, non-erasable" format in Smarsh's data centers with monthly backups of messages on encrypted DVDs
2. Enabling instant access, user-friendly search and data production capabilities and day-to-day manual supervision and automated systematic monitoring through a secure, Web-based administration interface
3. Producing all data and relevant sub-sets on-demand, for audits, litigation and third-party e-Discovery applications
4. Logging all message inspections and providing a comprehensive message and system audit trail, including customizable system activity reports to illustrate policy enforcement and evidence of review
5. Capturing and preserving all inbound, outbound and internal messages
6. Enabling organizations to delegate and administrate permissioned message review authority, enterprise-wide
7. Acting as an independent third-party downloader to offer access to an organization’s electronic records if the firm is unable

About Smarsh

Smarsh® is the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email-archiving solutions for message compliance and records retention, proactive litigation readiness and mail server data management.

The SaaS (software as a service) delivery model enables clients to eliminate IT infrastructure costs and minimize operating burden, while benefiting from Smarsh’s expertise and experience in hosting large volumes of mission-critical client data. Customizable solutions fit the needs, budgets and technological infrastructure of any firm and are matched with unrivaled customer support and service.

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