SEC Email Compliance Archiving | RIA E-mail Compliance

Overview

Features

How It Works

The Cloud

Making Compliance Easy for Advisers

The Smarsh email archiving and compliance solution will capture every email (and attachment) that enters or leaves your organization, as well as internal messages, and preserve them all in evidentiary-quality form in a central repository. Within the Web-based Smarsh Management Console, administrators leverage best-in-class search, supervision and on-demand export functionality.

RIA E-mail Compliance Smarsh solutions for classification and supervision efficiency, data-leak prevention and email encryption were designed to integrate with the Smarsh email archiving platform. All services within the integrated suite are centrally administrated through the Smarsh Management Console. Permissioned administrators can review electronic communication, implement classification, data-leak prevention and encryption policies, and analyze the effectiveness of enforcement procedures through comprehensive and customizable reporting.

Smarsh email and message archiving solutions are designed to help your manage the challenges created by the proliferation of organizational email. The platform enables you to:

Automatically preserve all electronic business records and store securely on tamper-proof media for their designated retention period(s).
Locate and produce electronic communications quickly, and be prepared for SEC examinations or requests with on-demand data production.
Customize your firm’s supervision policies without technology limitations. Configure company-approved keyword lists. Automate policy enforcement and streamline compliance review procedures with systemized search criteria.
Show documented records of supervisory procedures through detailed audit trails and demonstrate policy enforcement and evaluation.
Offload the cost and operational burden of managing complex and disparate email and messaging applications.

Smarsh Hosted Email Archiving

Capture | Preserve | Search | Supervise | Produce

Capture

Email traffic is captured instantly at the mail server, ensuring that any message sent to, from, or within clients’ domains will be archived and processed.

Flexible integration | The unique Smarsh architecture is platform-agnostic and integrates with on-premise (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus, Novell, etc.) and SaaS (Google Apps for Business, for example) messaging platforms. Journaling is the primary capture method, but Smarsh supports multiple means of capture.
Real-time processing | Messages and attachments are delivered and processed within the archive immediately.
Header data/metadata | Full header data and metadata (including message date and time, IP addresses for all server hops, types of servers, etc.) from each message is captured, indexed and preserved. In addition, all metadata created by message review activity within the Smarsh Management Console is also stored in a read-only format for subsequent evidentiary auditing.
Import legacy email | Leverage Smarsh client data management resources and migrate legacy data into one platform, creating a consolidated archive for rapid retrieval and review.

Preserve

Client messages and attachments are always readily accessible via the web-based Smarsh Management Console. They never go off-line (unless specified by the client).

Redundant data centers | Email and electronic messages and attachments are preserved in the redundant, geographically-dispersed Smarsh data centers and burned to WORM (write once, read many) optical storage.
Retention policies | Messages are retained in accordance with client retention policies (and active legal holds).

Search

Administrators can search across their email and electronic message archives based on virtually any criteria, either ad-hoc or on a consistent, systematic basis.

Robust field search | Smarsh indexes the entire electronic message, and enables search by Boolean combinations of virtually every associated field, including: text/HTML body, subject, sender, recipient (including CC, BCC & distribution lists), message date and time, headers (including IP address), attachment type, attachment name, attachment contents (for approximately 400 file types).
Saved searches | Save search criteria and repeat searches for convenience, consistency and evidence of policy enforcement.
E-discovery searches | Run robust ad-hoc discovery searches for one-time instances.
Support for multiple lexicon lists | Clients can customize company-approved lexicons of keywords/phrases for search and/or start with a default list provided by Smarsh.
Multiple email addresses, aliases | Search traffic of an unlimited number of email addresses per employee.
Immediate search results | Once the desired emails have been identified in the archive’s search page, they can be immediately viewed online, downloaded directly to a PC, or encrypted and copied to portable electronic media.
Personal archive access | End-users may access their personal email archive securely from any web browser, mobile device, or an integrated email client plug-in, and they can search their own archives based on a variety of criteria including keywords, sender, recipient, date range etc. Once messages have been located, users can drag and drop messages, restoring them to their live mailbox (with original timestamp), download, forward, reply, file (tag) and more. End users also have access to customizable saved searches and other tools to conveniently provide access to historical messages.

Supervise

Your supervision procedures are not at the mercy of inflexible technology. Customize your firm's supervision expor serience for optimal efficiency in message review and effectiveness in identifying and mitigating risk.

Hierarchy structure | Permission-based review hierarchy can be configured to model the review structure of your organization. Administrators can assign message supervision roles/authorities to specific users and groups, and grant the appropriate level of access/functionality to them. Smarsh can grant temporary permissions or access to compliance consultants, outside legal counsel or other individuals.
Run saved searches | Execute review procedures with regularly scheduled saved searches.
Flexible search options | Match search type (random percent, risk score, keywords or phrases) to risk profile.
Contextual review | Track chains of emails from multiple individuals.
Full audit trail | Every administrator session and action taken throughout the entire lifecycle of a message is documented within the Smarsh Management Console.
Take action on messages | Reviewers have the ability to annotate, flag, open/close or escalate messages. All actions are logged and the subsequent metadata is indexed and searchable.
Reporting Center | Produce analytics reports on corporate email usage, system audit history and message archive data. Demonstrate policy enforcement and ensure accountability among multiple managers responsible for message review. Reports can be customized.

Produce

Administrators can retrieve and produce as many messages as necessary, in original form, on demand.

Production options | Messages can be securely downloaded to a PC or encrypted and saved to a portable media device. This can be utilized for real-time access to data during an investigation or examination, or to restore data for disaster recovery purposes.
Flexible e-discovery export | Export message data in popular e-discovery vendor “load file” formats (and the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) XML Interchange Format Schema) and transfer it directly to document review and processing systems.
Monthly DVD service | As part of its service package, Smarsh delivers monthly copies of client data via encrypted DVD.

How it Works

Email traffic is captured instantly at the mail server, ensuring that any message sent to, from, or within clients’ domains will be archived and processed by Smarsh software. Smarsh supports multiple message capture methods but primarily employs the journaling function, standard on most mail servers. Unlike other POP connectors or a local journal, journaling directly and instantly to offsite Smarsh archiving servers ensures that:

all emails and attachments are instantly placed in the archive,
the archive can be used for disaster recovery purposes as all messages are immediately saved offsite,
there is NO window of opportunity for employees or administrators to tamper with messages before they are sent to the archive.

Captured messages are placed in an archive mailbox using SMTP delivery (secured by TLS encryption or a VPN tunnel). This mailbox is unique to each client to avoid any commingling of messages. Next, our proprietary archiving software retrieves these messages from the archive mailbox and:

scans new messages for keyword, phrase or rule violations established by the customer,
indexes each message and attachments using a full-text index/catalog to permit searches in our web applications,
stores duplicate working copies of attachments and email files to a redundant file server/storage network to facilitate immediate access to message files and attachments in the Smarsh Management Console,
replicates archived messages to remote data centers,
creates an MD5 hash which can be used for subsequent certification and verification that the message has not been altered,
burns messages to WORM optical storage for regualtory compliance.

The Benefits of the Smarsh Cloud Model

Security & Privacy

You always maintain ownership and control of your data. Multiple physical, procedural and technical safeguards are in place to protect and limit access to your data. Smarsh data centers are redundant, geographically-dispersed and SSAE 16 audited. All systems are protected by multi-tiered firewalls and proactively monitored within the Smarsh Network Operations Center. Encrypted access to your data is granted only to your firm’s approved system administrators.

Performance

Free up storage capacity | Forrester Research survey data indicates that storage capacity requirements are growing between 20 and 40 percent each year.¹ By "off-loading" data, your company can free up valuable storage space and optimize server performance. Remove content from your messaging server and migrate it to an archiving platform.
Global availability | Full platform functionality is available securely 24-7 via the Internet.
Search and produce data quickly | Smarsh offers the storage, database and indexing expertise to ensure optimal search and retrieval times, even as the volume of your archive grows.
Seamless updates | Rather than waiting for the release and installation of your software’s next version, Smarsh platform updates are introduced regularly.

Deployment

Rapid on-boarding | Your firm can be up and running on the Smarsh platform in days or weeks rather than a long-term phased timeline. With its diverse and growing client base, Smarsh has encountered a variety of system integration scenarios and manages the deployment process for you.
Flexible integration | The unique Smarsh architecture is platform-agnostic and integrates with on-premise (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus, Novell, etc.) and SaaS (Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business, for example) messaging platforms.

Cost

Predictable pricing | Smarsh does not charge for storage or disk space, significantly reducing costs for traditional email backup. Pricing is predictable, easy to budget and does not require large capital expenditures.
No software/hardware to maintain | Smarsh manages all hardware and software within its data centers, and upgrades are automatic and included as part of the managed service.
Minimized internal IT operating burden | Maintain access and ownership of all of your information, and liberate your IT team to focus on core competencies.

¹ In Search of Information Governance in the Enterprise (blog). Forrester Research, Inc. 31 March 2010.

Products and Services

Flexible Integration

Survey on SaaS Email Archiving

Email Archiving for RIAs

Making Compliance Easy for Advisers