Shield updates archive for banks with cheaper storage

Shield has updated its Shield Archive product for financial institutions, with changes focused on archive modernisation and regulatory compliance.

The release adds intelligent storage tiering, migration tools for large archive estates, and broader governance controls for legal hold and supervision.

Financial institutions are under pressure to replace older archive systems while keeping records accessible for audits, investigations, and regulatory reviews. Archive projects can be slowed by the risk of data loss during migration, the cost of long-term storage, and the need to preserve complete records across multiple systems.

The new storage structure is designed to reduce retention costs by moving less frequently used data into lower-cost storage while keeping commonly used data searchable. According to Shield, the approach can cut storage costs by up to 50% without removing access to metadata or affecting retrieval for compliance work.

Records stored in lower-cost tiers can be restored on demand for investigations or audits. The archive is intended to support regulatory requirements, including SEC 17a-4, CFTC, FINRA, and MiFID II.

Migration focus

A second part of the update centres on moving historical records from legacy archives into a new environment. Migration remains one of the main obstacles to archive replacement because firms must maintain the lineage, completeness, and defensibility of records as data is transferred.

Shield says its platform supports multi-petabyte migrations and has been used in projects exceeding 9 petabytes, covering more than 50 billion records across 40 systems. The system also processes more than 70 billion records a year, with a throughput of up to 60TB a day.

Those figures are meant to show that large banks and other regulated firms can shift data from older systems at scale without breaking audit trails. Validation and reconciliation processes are used to check completeness and integrity after data has been moved.

Ofir Shabtai, chief technology officer at Shield, said the update is aimed at long-standing archive challenges for regulated institutions.

"Archive modernisation has been constrained by migration risk, rising long-term costs, and limited control over data," said Ofir Shabtai, chief technology officer at Shield. "Shield Archive removes these barriers with a connected, AI-enabled data layer, combining proven large-scale migration with more efficient retention and enhanced governance controls that give compliance and legal teams greater visibility, control, and confidence in their data."

Wider controls

The latest release also expands legal hold and governance functions. Compliance and legal teams can see more detail about preserved data and policy settings, while bulk policy management allows legal holds to be configured through self-service tools rather than vendor intervention.

These changes are intended to help firms respond more quickly when they need to assess preserved communications for legal review or internal investigations. AI-based tools can also support the identification of relevant records during those processes.

Shield describes the archive as using single-tenant immutable write-once, read-many storage, with retention policies, audit trails, and data residency options. Customers can also access their data without export or exit fees.

The product sits within Shield's wider digital communications governance and archiving business for financial institutions. The market has grown in importance as regulators scrutinise how banks, brokers, and trading firms retain and supervise communications across a rising number of digital channels.

Firms in the sector are under pressure to keep records complete, searchable, and tamper-resistant while also controlling the cost of long-term storage. That has made archive consolidation and the replacement of older systems a priority for many compliance and technology teams.

Shield says its archive platform was ranked among the top three vendors for archive platforms in Gartner's 2025 Critical Capabilities for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving. It also says Gartner ranked it among the top three vendors for connectivity in the same market, covering the ability to connect to and move data from a range of legacy and newer systems.

The latest release reflects a broader shift among archive vendors to combine lower-cost cloud storage models with stronger governance features as financial institutions update infrastructure without increasing regulatory risk. Shield says its archive is intended to preserve records as complete and defensible after migration, with full auditability across the data lifecycle.