If your company acts as a financial institution, it is affected by various legislation, including federal laws such as The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Non-compliance to GLBA can lead to severe civil and criminal penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment.
Check out our new infographic and learn:
- about the fundamentals of GLBA
- how GLBA affects your everyday business operations in practice
- what GLBA means for information security and
- how to avoid violating GLBA and safeguard sensitive data with email archiving.
What is GLBA?
The Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), is a federal US law enacted to monitor and control the ways financial institutions handle sensitive private information of individuals.
Who does it affect?
It applies to companies that offer their customers any sort of financial products or services, such as loans, insurance or investment advice. This specifically applies to banks, credit reporting agencies, debt collectors, security companies, tax preparation companies, real estate companies, insurance companies and any correspondent companies doing business with them.
GLBA consists of three parts:
- The Financial Privacy Rule, dealing with disclosure of confidential financial information;
- The Safeguards Rule, obliging financial institutions to provide security programs to protect confidential information;
- The Pretexting Provisions, prohibiting the access to private information under false pretenses.
The Act also requires institutions to provide written privacy notices explaining their practices of sharing information.
How does it work in practice?
In practice, GLBA focuses on the security and confidentiality of private information stored and shared through email correspondence. In accordance with GLBA, companies are required to have secure access controls for protecting information storage and email retention periods of six years.
To comply with this law, financial institutions have to take special care of optimizing, tracking and storing their digital data.
How to Comply with Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act with Email Archiving
Server breakdowns, lack of storage space and Big Data piled up in email communication impose great challenges for maintaining transparent and safe business. To comply with all three segments of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, companies need to optimize and secure their data storage and email communication.
By opting for an email archiving solution, companies can guarantee their clients that their sensitive data is carefully stored and manipulated and that it will be readily available in case a legal dispute occurs.
5 Benefits of Email Archiving
1. Safe information backup
Email archiving protects you from accidental deletion or damage of sensitive information as it backs up all sent and received documents in a stable format. This means you’ll have an efficient recovery strategy even in cases of system breakdowns.
2. Storage space optimization
By deleting and deduplicating emails and documents in your company inboxes, email archiving helps you reduce the digital content exchanged and shared. In a simple and automated way, it helps you create additional storage space needed for the stability of data during the retention period required by the law.
3. Transparent communication
In accordance with GLBA, companies are obliged to safely handle clients’ confidential information. With email archiving, you can easily monitor all internal and external communication. This will give you more control over the sensitive information and make data handling and protection much easier.
4. Information and Property Protection
An email archiving tool helps you meet all regulatory and legal requirements and minimizes the risk of intellectual property theft and false pretenses in email communication. It provides simple communication tracking without employing additional resources for handling legal issues.
5. Efficient Legal Discovery
One of the greatest benefits of email archiving is the automation of eDiscovery by custom made data indexing and archiving. In cases of legal disputes, email archiving can help you track down and present the data promptly, in accord with the GLBA compliance standards.
What are the penalties for non-compliance?
Failing to comply with Gramm-Leach-Bliley can lead to business disruption and heavy fines, up to five years of imprisonment and damage or loss of brand reputation. By adopting an efficient automated email archiving solution, you can successfully comply with GLBA and provide a transparent and trustworthy business practice to all your clients.
Jatheon’s email archiving tool can help you manage multiple risks, efficiently respond to compliance needs and optimize the internal and external business communication. To learn more, contact Jatheon.
