A poll of 187 executives with responsibility for compliance, messaging, and legal risk mitigation indicates that financial services firms that once relied on in-house software for email compliance and storage services are now moving to hosted solutions. The cost of meeting new regulatory mandates is a major issue, according to a study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study was commissioned by Bloomberg Vault, a service that helps corporations meet compliance, regulatory, and eDiscovery requirements.

More than 60% of the respondents polled said their shift to cloud-based solutions is driven by the promise of lower total cost of ownership, faster deployments, and easier management than on-site deployments. Half of the financial services firms polled said they plan to use hosted compliance solutions by 2012.

“The market has reached a tipping point,” said Harald Collet, global business manager of Bloomberg Vault. “We expect to see a significant adoption of cloud-based message archiving by financial services enterprises of all sizes over the next two years.”

 

 

Key findings of the survey include:
• Financial services firms struggle with eDiscovery and data privacy—55% of respondents described complying with data privacy laws as challenging. Also, decision-makers report significant difficulties in meeting litigation requirements, recording and archiving obligations, employee communications monitoring needs, and other regulatory requirements.

• Compliance challenges are multi-faceted—Edging out concerns about cost, 75% of the financial services decision-makers surveyed highlight concerns about reputational damage in conjunction with regulatory oversight and investigations. Respondents also cite major concerns with compliance-related application integration and lengthy response times.

• Financial services firms focus on a broad set of content for compliance—In addition to email, organizations perceive file shares, physical records, line-of-business applications, mobile messaging, and a wide range of other content types and applications to be critical for regulatory purposes.