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The Power of Partnering Archiving and Communication Surveillance Workflows

Every day, important business decisions are taking place via email, chat, video conferencing, and beyond. With more than half the population working remotely, there's been a rapid increase of communications taking place on these channels.

Adoption and utilization of new sources has been a challenge for many organizations, especially those who have regulatory compliance obligations. Highly regulated industries often have a requirement to monitor and retain employee communications. For many organizations, a data archive is the system of record responsible for the compliant storage of all in-scope communications.

Like a sturdy toolbox, an archive can contain all the data you might need for regulatory and code of conduct requirements, while keeping it safe and secure. But in order to meet the vast compliance challenges your team may face, tools of all sizes and for different purposes might need to live in that toolbox, too. That’s where communication surveillance comes in.

Connecting your archive with a communication surveillance platform like Relativity Trace helps you analyze that data in place, minimizing risks while addressing your compliance obligations in a proactive and technologically advanced way. With the ability to analyze over 50 data sources using artificial intelligence and pre-built policies to flag misconduct in 200+ languages, as well as help you conduct use cases beyond standard surveillance—such as trade reconstruction and attestation—Trace provides the tools necessary for a strategic compliance solution.

Why Integrating Your Surveillance Platform with Your Archive Is the Safe Bet

Taking a step back for a moment: We know that increasing data volumes, dispersed communication platforms, and bad actors make risk identification within organizations challenging. There is also more pressure than ever on compliance teams to proactively catch misconduct while balancing regulatory requirements. 

For example, global regulations like SEC Rule 17a-3 and 17a-4; FINRA Rules 3110, 3120, and 4511; MiFID 11; and MAR, require firms to keep a record of communications and activity to determine if wrongdoing has occurred. These surveillance activities represent responsible compliance with regulations as well as an important line of defense against misconduct, but they come with their own complications—including issues involving data storage, migration, and access. Capturing and storing this data in an archive and then moving it between endpoints for review is traditionally accomplished through a variety of connectors across multiple platforms.

To avoid the risk and hassle of moving data between systems at different stages of your compliance activities, the most defensible strategy involves a singular connection to a best-in-class archive for storing and monitoring data. Connecting these two systems securely ensures you’re keeping surveillance data secure and accessible in a centralized place, while enabling your teams to access that data for any necessary review, investigation, and analysis of potential misconduct.

A Solution for Trace Users

This need for connectivity is why Relativity has partnered with Proofpoint to create an automated integration between Proofpoint Enterprise Archive and Relativity Trace.

Proofpoint Enterprise Archive is a cloud-based archiving solution that simplifies legal discovery, regulatory compliance, and end user data access. It provides a secure and searchable central repository for a wide range of content types without the headaches of managing an email archive in-house. 

The integration with Trace mitigates the risks involved in migrating data from one platform to another, and gives customers a more seamless end-to-end experience across archive and surveillance activities. With it, Trace users can benefit from the combination of Proofpoint’s archive and Relativity Trace’s AI-powered surveillance software with fewer delays and data transfer efforts.   

On the back end, customer data gets ingested into the Proofpoint Archive via Proofpoint’s Content Capture solution or VerQu’s data migration capabilities. Within Proofpoint’s cloud-based Enterprise Archive, data lives in a secure and searchable repository. Once individuals who require enhanced surveillance have been identified, Trace will pull those individuals’ relevant data continuously from Proofpoint, generating alerts by identifying complex behaviors that could indicate misconduct. 

Automated, Targeted, and Secure Connection  

Your data is only as good as the tools you have to ingest and organize it. Data that is not well understood quickly becomes more liability than asset, and your team shouldn’t leave those insights behind—or expose them to unnecessary risk.

By connecting with a robust surveillance platform, you can better pinpoint risk and reduce manual processes. Secure cloud-to-cloud transfers ensure the archive remains the single source of truth for all relevant data while limiting gaps in surveillance strategy. Then, by managing fewer data connectors across your archive solution and relying on Trace’s AI-powered system to automate more accurate flagging protocols, your compliance team can spend more time on what really matters: focusing on the riskiest content and shutting down misconduct before it gets out of control. 

Schedule a Demo of Relativity Trace


Cassandra Morrison is a senior specialist in content marketing at Relativity, with a special focus on the needs of in-house corporate legal teams.

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