Scality announced that compliance auditing firm Cohasset Associates has certified Scality RING as SEC 17a-4(f) compliant — a data security milestone achieved by only a handful of storage systems.
The Scality RING object storage solution is now certified as compliant for use cases that require specific capabilities and features needed for highly secure data storage in banks, brokerage firms and other financial institutions. These include:
- WORM (write once read many) storage – WORM protection makes data immutable, preventing it from being modified or deleted, allowing it to be read as many times as needed while adhering to user access control policies.
- Data retention – The system provides policies for how long data should be stored.
- Legal holds – Administrators in the financial industry can override a data retention policy for a legal reason. For example, if data is stored for five years, in the sixth year it remains locked for legal reasons as specified by the legal hold.
- Auditing – The system provides extensive audit trails to see who accessed the system, when and what actions they performed to enable forensic analysis for all events.
Scality has seven of the world’s largest banks as customers, and this SEC compliance certification means those customers can build on their existing big data analytics, backup, archive and private-cloud use cases to also store compliance-related data. Cohasset’s third-party certification broadens the use cases for RING in financial companies beyond normal backup and archival use cases, to include data that the Securities and Exchange Commission deems as requiring special data protection — for instance, customer financial and trading records and histories, including backups of this data.
Paul Speciale, chief product officer, Scality, said: “RING provides bulletproof security features that our financial industry customers need by law. RING can now consolidate normal backup and archival data, as well as specialized compliance data. This further reduces silos by eliminating the need for another specific storage system for compliance data only. This certification creates trust that some of the world’s most sensitive data from financial institutions can be stored on RING, so it can also be trusted in other regulatory compliance use cases, such as the healthcare and government sectors.”
