Recent changes in regulatory requirements have forced new demands on IT and storage planners to accommodate changing expectations and legal standards for compliance. In addition to managing other aspects of mushrooming storage requirements, storage planners now have to accommodate the special needs of industry and general business compliance.
Compliance is more than storage. It is the convergence of policy, procedures, practices, processes and information. Every company has many types of records that need to be managed in special ways in order to comply with the regulations that dictate record handling.
In order to master a compliance-responsive storage architecture, companies need a clear understanding of the regulatory requirements and their implications.
SANZ Compliance Services provide structured analysis for regulatory requirements and insightful support in the design and implementation of storage solutions that are mindful of compliance requirements.
Our services include
Compliance Profiling
Regulatory compliance is a many faceted, complex business requirement. Often, sudden changes in regulatory requirements or increased enforcement cause companies to react with narrowly focused ``point solutions`` that wreck havoc with an orderly IT environment. Compliance Profiling provides IT planners and strategists with a global perspective of their compliance requirements and the related functionality necessary to support a wide spectrum of compliance requirements. The results are lower costs in responding to specific compliance applications and faster turn around when new demands arise.
Compliant Storage Infrastructure Planning and Design
Compliant Storage is a unique storage environment. It may focus on a narrow set of applications within an enterprise or it may be a ubiquitous part of an enterprise wide deployment. Its characteristics go beyond the functionality of conventional storage infrastructure and are dictated by requirements beyond issues of continuity and recovery. SANZ Compliance Services approaches the design of storage infrastructures with an expanded risk management perspective. In addition to business continuity and information availability, SANZ Compliance Solutions focus on assisting our clients in effectively mitigating both regulatory and litigation liability as a feature of the storage infrastructure.
Regulatory Assessment
Regulatory Assessment differs from Compliance Profiling in its granularity. The deliverable of a Regulatory Assessment is a comprehensive description of specific regulatory requirements and the storage solutions recommended to meet or exceed those requirements. Compliance Profiling prepares the foundation for addressing the specific requirements identified in Regulatory Assessments.
Integrated Compliance Planning
As the regulators expand their information access requirements and retention standards, the scope of the applications of compliant storage extends wider and wider. Integrated Compliance Planning analyzes the various requirements across applications and recommends an integrated approach to managing the disparate data forms. The objective is to provide maximum response to regulatory requirements at minimum costs.
Email Compliant Solutions
In recent months Email Compliance has been a critical compliance requirement that many companies still fail to solve adequately. Often, such failures result from an inadequate understanding of the storage implications of email retention regulations and the diversity of email regulations that flourish within a company. All too often, an email solution is put into place to address one problem, only to learn there are many more requirements. SANZ Compliance Services take a comprehensive risk management approach to ensure that the solution that is recommended satisfies all the performance requirements.
Compliant Records Management
Many companies still have a chaotic architecture for records management. Many more, have no architecture at all. Myriad documents are scattered across servers, desktop and laptop systems. The unstructured nature of working papers and documents not only increases costs exponentially, but also it increases enterprise liability. Bringing order and structure to these records not only reduces storage costs substantially, it also helps reduce risk to the enterprise.
Annual Compliance Reviews
More and more, regulators are requiring that companies not only bring their information into compliance-but that they keep them in compliance as well. Some regulations, such as SEC Rules 38(6) and 206(4) for Investment Advisors and Investment Companies clearly specify this requirement. SANZ Compliance Services use a structured methodology to maximize the completeness of these reviews while minimizing the costs.
Compliance Policy and Procedure Development
Storage infrastructure is only a part of a complete compliance solution. In addition to the data and information handling systems, the policies and procedures complete the response to regulatory requirements. SANZ Compliance Services work with our clients on policies and procedures that are easy to maintain and are consistent with the storage solutions that are implemented. This element is a critical part of a compliance solution.
End-to-End Integrated Compliancy Implementation
Because of unique the blend of compliance expertise, storage knowledge, multiple hardware and software solution options and project management skills, SANZ is positioned to provide complete end-to-end compliance project leadership. This is further enhanced by our Compliance Coaching Methodology that enables customers to take full advantage of our knowledge, expertise, methodology and templates while maximizing the use of internal resources.
Sarbanes-Oxley
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has introduced new dimensions to business records handling requirements. Often perceived as a financially focused, executive targeted set of standards, Sarbanes-Oxley in fact has far reaching implications that impact the management of all company records and a company`s relationship with all US government agencies. More importantly, the personal penalties of multimillion dollar fines and long term imprisonment apply to all people responsible for ensuring the integrity, preservation, availability and accessibility of all company records. IT managers are particularly at risk because of their close proximity and direct responsibility for the protection of record integrity.
