Noncompliance really does cost. Just this week, JPMorgan Chase paid securities regulators $2.1 million to settle claims that the financial services giant failed to retain business-related email for a three-year period. As part of the settlement, JPMorgan agreed to establish appropriate controls for email communications within 90 days.
“The total cost to JP Morgan was likely much higher than the $2.1 million they paid in fines,” said Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Peter Gerr. The company also likely had to pay legal fees and suffered lost productivity searching for requested emails, and may have even needed to hire an electronic data discovery (EDD) firm, “whose high fees can very quickly add up to millions of dollars,” Gerr said.
With news like that, it’s no wonder businesses are spending big bucks to comply with data protection regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and various SEC and NASD regs, making storage vendors big beneficiaries of the compliance wave.
“These cases should be viewed by end users as setting a precedent,” Gerr told Enterprise Storage Forum. “Electronic records are considered business records in the eyes of regulators and the courts. … In my opinion, implementing an email archiving solution is one of the most effective ways that users can reduce the amount of storage consumed by email applications, reign in personal mailboxes and PST files, while at the same time providing an automated means to preserve email and attachments in line with regulatory or governance mandates.”
Given the regulatory and legal backdrop, backup and recovery technologies are very much on the minds of storage vendors, who have announced scores of products that promise to help users address compliance needs. This week has been no exception.
LiveVault kicked off another busy week for data protection announcements this week with its InControl and InSync products, which combine network-and disk-based backup and recovery to create an automated data protection system targeting data backup, offsite storage, archiving, and data recovery.
LiveVault InControl, targeted at remote offices, starts at $25,000, and LiveVault InSync, aimed at small and mid-sized businesses, starts at $119 per month.
Competitor EVault was quick to claim it was there first, with EVault Desktop and EVault Continuum Server backup and high-availability solutions announced last year.
At the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston this week, Yosemite Technologies released a new service pack for its Yosemite TapeWare 7 product line that includes heterogeneous backup-to-disk functionality to help users backup and recover critical data more easily.
Also at LinuxWorld, Arkeia, CommVault and BakBone Software announced backup products targeted at the Linux market.
And Unitrends introduced a new version of its data protection software that lets companies backup and restore data in less time and allowing them to restore data from a crashed SCSI, IDE or SATA drive to an IDE system. The new features let companies react more quickly in the event of a crash, and also help them reduce costs by no longer requiring them to stock multiple drives in each of the three formats. Unitrends’ software also offers bare metal data recovery and runs on more than 20 operating systems.
With this week’s JPMorgan Chase news, it’s clear that end users aren’t finished spending on compliance, and there are plenty of vendors willing to help them.
