Data Completeness: eBook

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Data completeness with Global Relay

Data completeness with Global RelayContents

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About Global Relay

Why data completeness matters

Data completeness refers to the full capture and retention of business communications and trading activities, including all relevant metadata, across every channel. Achieving data completeness helps organizations improve business efficiency and avoid penalties from regulatory bodies—such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)—which require companies to record all electronic communications relating to business.

But why is data completeness such a priority? Incomplete data creates inefficiencies in business operations and compliance workflows. Compliance, eDiscovery, and legal teams lacking complete data can’t ensure their surveillance efforts, reports, and eDiscovery pulls are accurate. These teams may also struggle to build complete and accurate audit trails, if and when they’re needed, which can become a legal liability. When vendor solutions aren’t optimized for data completeness, compliance professionals have to spend extra time collating business data from multiple platforms and channels. There’s also increased chance of missing risks from compliance review.

When evaluating compliance solutions, your organization should consider whether they help or hinder your ability to achieve data completeness. A single-vendor solution can help ensure data completeness by facilitating a single, gold-copy standard of all your business data. This eliminates the complexity of multi-vendor solutions and mitigates the risk of your data being lost or tampered with.

In 2024, JPMorgan Chase was fined nearly $350 million for gaps in trading venue data—a clear example of how strict regulators are on their data completeness requirements. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) also stresses the importance of data completeness by requiring organizations to maintain strong oversight and reconciliation to support surveillance and detect misconduct.

Achieving data completeness with Global Relay

As an end-to-end provider of communications data capture, recordkeeping, and surveillance solutions, Global Relay enables you to manage all tasks in a single, secure ecosystem. From a recordkeeping standpoint, we comprehensively capture business data from 60+ sources and store everything in our proprietary, tamper-proof archive. Surveillance teams can then work with this same data without the need to transfer it across vendors.

With our single-vendor solution, your data never leaves our closed environment, so there’s no opportunity for it to be lost or breached through transfers between recordkeeping and surveillance teams. Safeguards such as constant integrity checks (CICs) and write once, read many (WORM) storage help maintain your data’s integrity. This ensures that all the data captured and archived by your recordkeeping teams is monitored in accordance with regulator expectations.

Read on to explore the steps that Global Relay takes to ensure the completeness of your data.

Step 1

We capture your communications data in full

Global Relay Connectors bridge the gap between your communications platforms and your archive solution, capturing and transferring all your data compliantly. With 60+ connectors spanning email, mobile, voice, financial applications, collaboration tools, and generative AI chat tools, every communication is captured securely and completely. Using official API integrations, Global Relay Connectors ensure that no data is lost in transit.

All messages, events, and metadata are captured, providing you with a holistic oversight of your communications data and enabling you to perform your recordkeeping, eDiscovery, and communications surveillance activities compliantly and efficiently.

Structured data for accuracy and searchability

All your data—whether it comes from email, voice, chat, social media, or file-sharing platforms—is structured through a normalization process. Our solution uses communication metadata to group and thread conversations, converting them into a standardized EML format.

This standardization approach improves the accuracy of our AI-enabled analysis tools and significantly simplifies the compliance review process. When data is presented in a consistent, searchable format, both people and AI can identify potential compliance issues more quickly. Structured data also allows for faster and more precise searching, filtering, and retrieval during audits, investigations, and eDiscovery.

EML deduplication for optimized search efficiency

The newly prepared EMLs then undergo a deduplication process at the Open Connector API and converter levels to remove any duplicate messages from entering the archive resulting in increased search efficiency. Archive-level duplicate detection also suppresses redundant email records from third-party journaling systems, so you get improved search accuracy and policy detection.

Robust failure handling for data loss mitigation

Global Relay’s failure handling process ensures all data is still accounted for in the event of a technical issue, such as a power outage. This includes automated data capture retries, ensuring all data arrives safely and securely in your archive.

Prevention against gaps in your data

With reconciliation reporting, each captured message is validated against the source it was gathered from to detect gaps or failures. In doing so, you have reassurance that every message that needs to be archived is captured by our data connector, with reduced manual validation effort.

Protection of your data in transit and at rest

Now that your data is structured, deduplicated, and captured completely, it’s ready to be transported to your archive for safe recordkeeping, eDiscovery, and surveillance.

Secured by Transport Layer Security (TLS) end-to-end encryption, Global Relay Connectors protect your data in transit, while FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security models protect your data at rest, safeguarding it against third-party or unwanted access.

Step 2

We safeguard your data and uphold recordkeeping compliance

Once your data reaches Global Relay Archive, the following safeguards maintain its quality and completeness for its entire retention period. These assurances allow you to meet recordkeeping compliance requirements, perform optimal surveillance activities, and conduct eDiscovery investigations with confidence.

Hosted in our privately owned data centers, Global Relay Archive provides a highly secure, unified, and tamper-proof environment for your data.

A recognizable organizational structure

Syncing your corporate directory with your Global Relay Archive lets you continuously capture and archive communications data for all necessary individuals. Your organizational structure is conveniently reflected in the archive, which automatically grants different people the appropriate level of access via role-based access control (RBAC). This way, you protect sensitive information and mitigate the risk of compliance breaches.

Additionally, classification tags get applied to your data in real-time using up-to-date user and group information from your directory, which gives you precise policy application, reliable search, and appropriate user access. In this governance-by-design approach, data is always current; consistently classified; and ready for supervision, audits, and discovery.

Fully traceable audit trails

A complete time-stamped audit trail of all actions performed on the data, by every user, is preserved and accessible at all times. By tracking user activity, you reinforce accountability, transparency, and compliance.

Continuous validation for preserved data integrity

To maintain your data’s quality, we apply robust CICs to regularly verify integrity and completeness. This ensures that the data hasn’t been tampered with or corrupted.

Over time, data in long-term storage can degrade, leading to reduced reliability or even loss. CICs help mitigate this risk via validation mechanisms that quickly detect the signs of degradation. Regular and complete scans of messages, indexes, Unified Parsed Messages, and metadata are compared to independent audit records. CICs look for data completeness in the archive, full storage redundancy, checksum integrity, and verified message disposition.

CICs ensure data remains unaltered and authentic throughout its lifecycle, as well as prevents evidence spoilation—both of which are crucial components for compliant recordkeeping. Additionally, CICs complement the consistency and integrity mechanisms internal to the archive’s storage subsystems.

Encrypted data for protection at rest

We also encrypt your data at rest and in transit, offering an extra layer of protection. Only authorized individuals can decrypt and access the data.

Secured records with WORM storage

WORM storage provides an additional guardrail against accidental or intentional changes to your data, preventing it from being modified or deleted once it’s been written.

WORM storage satisfies the regulatory requirement for all records to be preserved in their original state.

Reconciliation reports verify data completeness

Global Relay Archive gives you access to multiple data reconciliation reports, providing assurance that all the data you intended to send and store is present. These reports can also uncover gaps in sent data and resolve discrepancies early to maintain continuous compliance with data completeness policies.

Rolling deletion capabilities for when retention periods expire

To uphold governance and privacy expectations, we’ll automatically delete your data from your archive when your chosen retention periods expire. Alternatively, you can set notifications that request your approval for deletion when an expiry date is approaching.

Retention periods are flexible and customizable to accommodate different regulatory needs across your organization. For example, you can place records on legal hold for investigation or even extend your retention periods to allow for continued access to the data.

Step 3

We engage your complete data for surveillance

Comprehensive and compliant communications surveillance is only achievable when records are complete. With all data present in your Global Relay Archive and ready for analysis, investigation, and eDiscovery, the potential for risk is significantly reduced.

Context-based AI decisions

Global Relay Surveillance uses generative AI to thoroughly analyze communications data for potential risks.

Our comprehensive large language models (LLMs) review conversations in their entirety with remarkable accuracy, ensuring risk alerts are based on context rather than just keywords or phrases. When combined with the safeguards implemented within Global Relay Archive for maintaining complete records, the AI has as much reliable context as possible to draw on as it evaluates potential threats and breaches. The result? More precise risk identification and significantly fewer false positive alerts.

Improved data quality for better decision-making

The structuring and enrichment that occurs during ingestion prepares your data for optimal risk analysis, as well as adding valuable context to support follow-up alert investigation.

The structuring and enrichment process includes:

Normalizing all message types into a standardized, machine-readable format
Cleaning the data by parsing and labeling message components (e.g., the conversations, signatures, disclaimers, people joining or leaving chats, attachments, deleted messages, etc.)
Transcribing voice communications into analyzable text

Applying language translation, where applicable
Performing sentiment analysis to help filter by positive and negative tones

Generative AI is a powerful tool for detecting risks, especially when the data being analyzed is high quality and well structured. With data presented in a single, consistent format, the LLMs can concentrate on analysis without discrepancy distractions, giving you deeper, more reliable outcomes.

The bottom line

Put simply, data completeness isn’t just a “nice-to-have”—it’s essential for companies that need to stay compliant.

Surveillance outcomes are only as good as the data they ingest. Bad data in equals bad surveillance results out.

It’s important for recordkeeping and surveillance teams to work together when procuring an archiving solution to ensure complete visibility across the entire data archiving journey. A lack of operational synergy between these two functions can lead to the production of fragmented or inaccurate data.

Multi-vendor solutions add complexity to data governance structures that can fracture data as it’s passed from vendor to vendor. Global Relay’s single-vendor solution eliminates this complexity and third-party risk, while providing teams with full oversight across a single, uniform instance of business data.