A Broker-Dealer Runs a Seven-Year Immutable FINRA Archive on Files.com and Azure

An institutional broker-dealer, registered with the SEC and FINRA, operates in the plumbing of the fixed-income market, clearing repo under some of the strictest risk-management standards in the market.

A firm like that is regulated in everything it does, and its files are no exception. Broker-dealer record-keeping rules require the firm to keep a copy of its records off-site, in storage that cannot be altered by anyone, including the firm itself, and to produce those records years later when a regulator asks. The archive is not IT hygiene. It is core infrastructure for a regulated firm.

The firm wanted that archive to capture the working day, in storage the firm controls.

It built one on Files.com syncs into immutable Azure storage. The new archive captures file states several times a day, retains each captured version for seven years, and carried the firm’s historical records out of the hosted archive it replaced, GRM’s Visual Vault, before the firm retired it.

From Nightly Capture to Intraday Capture

The archive ran through Visual Vault, an off-site document archiving service from GRM. Feeding it was a home-grown job: every night, a scheduled task checked the archive bit on every file on the firm's servers, copied anything that had changed into a staging folder, and pushed the batch up to Visual Vault.

The firm wanted an archive that captured file versions throughout the trading day, in off-site storage the firm itself controls and nobody at the firm can alter. The firm set that specification and searched for a product purpose-built for the obligation. The search came back empty. There was nothing on the shelf to buy.

What a Replacement Had to Do

Since there was no compliance-archive product to buy, the replacement had to be assembled, and the requirements were unforgiving. It had to capture file versions throughout the day, not just a nightly snapshot. It had to land each captured version in off-site storage that nobody at the firm can modify, shorten, or delete, and hold it for the seven years the rules require. It had to make retrieval defensible, so files could be found by who saved them and when. And it had to carry years of historical records out of Visual Vault before the vendor relationship ended, so the firm's past arrived in the new archive first.

Files.com became that layer: the platform that moved files from the firm’s servers into immutable cloud storage and the path the legacy archive traveled on its way out of Visual Vault.

Scheduled Sync Into a Container Nobody Can Alter

A Files.com Agent ran on the firm's on-premises server and connected outbound to Files.com, so the firm opened no inbound path to its network to replace the old system. Scheduled Files.com Syncs pulled changed files through the Agent several times a day.

On the far side sat an Azure Blob storage container, connected to Files.com as a Remote Server with versioning enabled. Every change captured by a sync landed there as a new version. The container carried a seven-year time-based retention policy, enforced at the version level: once a version was written, no one at the firm could change or remove it until the clock ran out.

That permanence is exactly why the policy was not locked on day one. An immutability mistake cannot be undone, so the CTO deliberately left the retention policy unlocked while the sync behavior was validated end to end, with the old nightly push still running alongside. Only after the archive was proven did the policy get locked, in early 2025, and the legacy job get switched off.

The last task was the migration. The firm pulled its historical records out of Visual Vault through Files.com into a dedicated directory in the new archive, preserving the original structure, and then ended the vendor relationship.

Version Capture Throughout the Day

With the syncs in production and the retention policy locked, the firm replaced a once-a-day snapshot pushed to a hosted archive with a more frequent, immutable record the firm controls.

• Version capture runs several times a day instead of once a day, so intraday edits and deletions reach the archive as versions of their own.
• A regulator's request for every file a given user saved on a given date is answered from storage no one at the firm can alter.
• The syncs run at the scale of a trading operation: the trading directory alone runs to more than a million files, synced several times a day.
• Visual Vault is retired, and the firm's historical records reached the new archive first, so ending the vendor cost none of the past.

A Regulator-Grade Archive Without a Specialist Vendor

Today, one of a broker-dealer's most unforgiving obligations runs on two commodity parts: Azure storage the firm already trusted, and Files.com keeping it fed. What the firm assembled is stricter than the specialist system it replaced, because the immutability is enforced by the storage itself, at the version level, and it was validated end to end before the lock was made permanent.

The difference lands where it matters. An examiner's request for a given user's files on a given date comes back out of a record that captures the working day several times over, from storage nobody at the firm can touch.