Following the $1.4 billion SEC settlement with 10 once highly respected Wall Street firms in April 2003, storage companies have been tripping over each other to get their email archiving products out the door (see SEC, NY Settle With the Banks, Oregon Taps StorageTek for Email, Persist Packs Away Email and HP SAN-Blasts Email). Now, as financial institutions realize that they can get in as much trouble for not supervising and storing IM messages as they have for sloppy email policies, a whole new group of vendors is likely to prosper.
A day after the NASD announcement, IM software vendor IMlogic Inc. announced that its IMlogic IM Manager software for IM record retention and supervision supports the NASD regulations (see IMLogic Offers IM Compliance). "This is good news for us," says Jon Sakoda, the companys director of products. "Within the financial services industry, therell be a rapid adoption of our technology."
IMlogic and competitors like Akonix Systems Inc., Communicator Inc., and FaceTime Communications Inc. offer software that captures the IM stream and archives it as searchable, logical conversations. The software can also block messages containing certain words, or can highlight messages containing the words.
Data storage and archiving vendors, too, have a lot to gain from the new ruling. The IM software vendors are already partnering with companies like KVS Inc., Educom TS Inc., Iron Mountain Inc., and Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) for longer-term storage of the IM data (see Legato Mines Iron Mountain and Iron Mountain Touts Compliance Services). The ruling requires companies to keep the data easily accessible for the first two years and archived for at least another year.
"Its great!" says Margaret Rimmler, Iron Mountain's VP of marketing for enterprise solutions and services group, pointing out that the news was not unexpected. "Everybodys going to moan that they have one more thing to worry about, but they really knew about already... This is just making it official."
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IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
