A Retail and Commercial Bank Ages Out Terabytes of Compliance Archives Automatically With Files.com

A US retail and commercial bank serves businesses, homeowners, and non-profits across the country.

It is also regulated on every side. The bank is a state-chartered, FDIC-member institution, and a bank under that regime generates records constantly, including call recordings and security logs. Regulation and bank policy say exactly how long each class of record must be kept. Those retention periods are measured in years. The storage they sat on was measured in whatever fit on the bank's own SAN and NAS.

Retention Measured in Years, Storage Measured in Hardware

The bank's archive tier was its own on-premises storage: a local SAN, plus a NAS that was running out of room. Onto that finite hardware flowed data with long clocks attached. Syslog archives from the bank's SolarWinds LEM log platform, other historical records, and call recordings each ran on a clock of their own.

The requirement underneath all of it: the bank wanted retention to be a control the platform enforces, not a procedure a person carries. Data the bank was required to keep occupied storage it could not easily expand, and data that had reached the end of its clock was deleted by hand, on a schedule tracked by hand. For a bank whose IT leadership has to show that its procedures match its policy, the deletion date for every class of record had to be something the archive tier applied on its own.

The source systems could not move. SolarWinds LEM runs on-premises, and archives had to keep flowing every night. The available answers each solved half of it: expanding on-prem storage bought space without enforcement, and tracking deletion dates by hand across different clocks put a recurring task on the IT calendar for every class of data. Meanwhile archives accumulate daily and obligations run for years, so the archive tier had to grow with them.

What the bank needed was an archive tier that could take a nightly push from on-prem systems at real volume, hold historical data off the SAN, and apply a different retention clock to each class of data automatically. It had to delete on the day policy says, and not before, without anyone managing the lifecycle. The bank selected Files.com to be that archive tier.

A Nightly Push Off the SAN, and a Clock on Every Folder

Files.com became the bank's governed older-storage tier. Anything the bank does not want occupying the local SAN moves off, and expires by rule.

The first workload was the SolarWinds LEM archive. The bank seeded hundreds of gigabytes of alert-database archives using the Files.com CLI, then used the Files.com Agent and a nightly scheduled Files.com Automation to move new archives from local storage. The push runs one way, so clearing space on the SAN never deletes the archive copy, and expiring the archive never reaches back into the on-prem folders.

Retention is enforced where the data lives. Files.com File Expiration rules are set per folder to match each clock. The sweep runs daily, deletes anything past its date, and records every deletion in the same logs as any other file action. Deleted files are retained as restorable backups for a window before final removal, so the rules are enforceable without being irreversible.

The Clocks Run at Scale

With the archive workflow in production, the bank replaced deletion dates tracked by hand with rules Files.com applies every day.

• Historical data leaves the SAN and NAS automatically. Nightly runs range from dozens to thousands of files.
• Retention enforces itself. Expiration sweeps remove data that has reached the end of its clock, with no one issuing a delete.
• The clocks demonstrably run. The bank holds terabytes of active archive on Files.com, and roughly as much again has already been deleted under the retention rules, with more data sitting in the deleted-but-restorable window.
• Taking on another data class is a folder and an expiration rule. The next retention obligation gets the same nightly push and its own clock, with no new procedure for staff to carry.

Procedures That Match Policy

Before Files.com, keeping data consumed finite NAS capacity and deleting it was a task a person performed. Today, Files.com expiration rules hold each class of record for its required period, remove it when that period ends, and leave a log for IT leadership to show that procedure matches policy.

The bank's retention obligations did not get smaller. What changed is that the archive tier itself enforces them, every day, with no deletion task on anyone's calendar.