Sarbanes-Oxley's Archival Storage Requirements
Sarbanes Oxley exposes CEOs and CFOs to fines and imprisonment for knowingly making false financial statements. It also makes tampering with financial data which could be the subject of an investigation a crime as well.
We believe that Sarbanes Oxley will have significant long-term effects on the storage industry specifically in the area of Archival Storage. Here, we summarize our analysis of the impact of new financial reporting requirements on enterprise storage environments and those who manage them.
The Act states that public accounting firms are required to "prepare, and maintain for a period of not less than 7 years, audit work papers, and other information related to any audit report, in sufficient detail to support the conclusions reached in such report." While the language of the law applies to accounting firms, we believe that to be prudent, enterprises should and will maintain copies of this supporting data for 7 years as well.
In addition, the law states that it is a crime for "any person to corruptly alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal any document with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding or to otherwise obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding..."
We believe that the effect of this provision in the Act will force enterprises to save all data -- including such data formats as e-mails, transaction logs, digitized voice-mail, etc. -- that their corporate attorneys believe could become the subject of an investigation should one arise. Here, the law appears to look as far back in time as it wants to, making it difficult at best to determine how long such data needs to be saved. All of the foregoing equates to more data captured and stored. Further aggravating the situation, regulatory compliance data must now be saved for longer periods of time, making even more challenging the job of building a platform to store all this data.
Therefore, organizations must choose an Archival Systems that meets with these new requirements and seamlessly and non-disruptively scale in terms of terabytes (and possibly, petabytes) depending on the size of the enterprise, and the number and nature of its transactions. Network attached optical storage is ideally suited to meet all the requirements for archival storage established under The Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
How SAMServer Addresses Sarbanes-Oxley Storage Requirements
StorageQuest's SAMServer series of network attached appliances unify optical storage providing organizations with an integrated approach to streamlining compliant archive storage and reducing costs in FIVE ways:
1. Unified Storage
The SAMServer optical archive management provides file-sharing and management from anywhere on the network. Investments in the build-out of storage area networks and infrastructures, to better manage information and storage costs, are fully leveraged through the SAMServer.
2. Open Storage
The SAMServer utilizes industry standards such as: Universal Disc Format (UDF), TCP/IP, NFS, CIFS, HTTP, SNMP, SCSI, Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI. Complete system transparency is achieved through the use of UDF which is fully supported by all major operating systems including: Windows, MAC/OS and UNIX providing a completely open and transportable archive solution. Information stored through the MSM onto optical media can be read by any of the aforementioned operating systems as a standard operation - no special drivers or additional software to purchase. Your archived data is free from vendor "lock-in" as nothing is proprietary. The SAMServer provides total freedom of choice for compliant archiving regardless of Vendor, Format or Media.
3. Simplified Storage Management
The SAMServer provides total management for all of your archiving resources through its powerful, yet easy to use, Windows GUI-based management and control system. Truly a Plug-n-Play experience as within minutes, applications are archiving and retrieving data from anywhere on the network.
4. Complete Storage Support
The SAMServer supports the complete range of optical media formats including: WORM, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, CCW,CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW. By providing our unified storage solution as these products come to market, it ensures a compliant archiving roadmap for many years to come.
5. Low Cost Storage
The SAMServer lowers the total cost of compliant archival storage in several ways: Through its simple Plug-n-Play appliance model systems administrators can easily install, configure and manage optical library systems. There is no need for high level technical resources to be employed to support an SAMServer Archival system. The SAMServer enables the sharing of the optical storage resources throughout the network, amortizing the archival costs across many applications, thus lowering the total cost of ownership for compliant storage within the enterprise. The SAMServer lowers costs through the utilization of low cost optical storage. For example: a DVD-R library system using the UDF format enables any data archived on inexpensive DVD-R media to be read on any Windows, MAC/OS or UNIX system directly. Today's systems have DVD drives already installed so there is no additional hardware or software to purchase. This totally open architecture greatly reduces long term storage costs and management, while eliminating the need for costly and risky data conversations from one system to another.
For all questions regarding government laws & regulations seek legal counsel. The information on this site is not a legal opinion or legal advice.