EMC helps Adirondack Electronics Markets comply with SEC, NASD regulations

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, announced today that Adirondack Electronics Markets (AEM) has implemented EMC`s Proven Solution for E-mail Archiving to help comply with US government mandated e-mail archiving requirements.

The EMC Proven Solution allowed AEM, a privately held market maker and member of the International Securities Exchange (ISE), to realise significant cost and time savings in managing huge volumes of e-mail associated with securities trading.

Additionally, this archival solution - combining EMC Centera and LEGATO EmailXtender, EmailXaminer and DiskXtender - increases AEM`s efficiency in compliance efforts since it can now retrieve authentic, archived e-mail records in minutes versus days.

Paul Vdovets, Director of Infrastructure for AEM, said: "Because we are a market maker on the ISE, we must abide by the strict e-mail archiving and supervision requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). The EMC Proven Solution provides us with a broad spectrum of capabilities for automated and secure archiving of all e-mail messages as they are sent or received, which helps us comply with regulations. Because EMC enables rapid retrieval of this information, we`re able to respond more rapidly and effectively to audits and legal discovery requests, which decreases costs for compliance."

SEC Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 require companies in the securities trading industry to retain and keep e-mail correspondence readily accessible for a minimum of three years. NASD regulations require broker-dealers to establish procedures for monitoring incoming and outgoing electronic communications relevant to their trading business. To comply with both agencies` regulations, AEM deployed the EMC Proven Solution for E-mail Archiving as part of its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. LEGATO EmailXaminer allows AEM to quickly and efficiently monitor, review and classify e-mail messages and store audit records in accordance with NASD requirements. This was previously a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. LEGATO EmailXtender defines and applies policies to users subject to the SEC requirements, automatically captures all e-mail messages and indexes these messages.

LEGATO DiskXtender then moves the e-mail to EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS), where it is retained securely for six years. "The SEC requires archived e-mail to be stored on non-erasable, non-rewriteable storage, while still being easily accessible," said Vdovets. "EMC Centera provides us with the content integrity, authenticity and accessibility we need to affordably satisfy SEC standards. With LEGATO EmailXtender`s search tools, we can easily fulfil requests for archived messages, sorted by user, date or subject - whatever is requested. EMC has a smarter solution than anything else out there."

This solution also enables AEM to archive and quickly retrieve critical information and monthly reports for local audits and legal discovery requests. Previously, audit requests would take at least a day to fulfil. With EMC, AEM is able to provide NASD with three months of e-mail in a matter of minutes. For monthly reports, AEM would manually burn the reports to CD and print the 600-700 page reports. AEM can now recall a report within seconds rather than sorting through thousands of files, which saves a tremendous amount of paper and personnel time.