At MPIE we recently provided input to a whitepaper from
NetApp - a leading unified storage solutions supplier - on compliance trends and how to reduce the risk and costs of their impact. I will leave you to judge the specific merits of the
NetApp solution, but the general principles are clear. By understanding and designing for the wider compliance trends (not just the requirements of each individual regulation), storing data once in a unified architecture and by choosing the correct level
of this architecture at which to implement specific functionality you not only reduce complexity (almost always a good thing in my view), but also improve the flexibility to react to the ever increasing demands of regulation.
Take just one example - data retention. Almost all regulations, most recently MiFID, require relevant data to be retained for specific periods. By implementing this retention constraint where the data is stored rather than in each application that uses it,
you can implement the constraint once, and every application can then comply. So if and when the compliance scope or period changes you only have to change it in one place. It sounds simple, but we still see too many firms who have implemented self contained
systems, one per regulation. As pointed out in the paper, with projected data growth of 1000% in just five years, this siloed approach is no longer viable.