Poland— Hitachi Europe Ltd., in cooperation with Hitachi Vantara, has created an intelligent data governance solution for safe and accessible information storage on durable medium in the form of write-once-read-many (WORM) storage. The solution has been acknowledged by the biggest banks in Poland, such as Bank Pekao S.A. and Bank Zachodni WBK S.A. who are now working with Hitachi, so they can meet the regulatory requierments in terms of providing information on durable medium.

WORM storage is a safe memory object store, which ensures that data is protected. Supplied as an appliance, WORM storage holds customers’ information within the bank’s infrastructure, eliminating the need to involve trusted third parties (TTP).

By becoming integrated into online banking systems or external web portals, WORM storage allows clients’ information to be accessible 24/7 and also meets regulators’ durable medium requirements.

Hitachi Europe Ltd.’s team in Poland developed the technological, legal and functional concept of using the WORM storage as a solution for durable medium issues. In December 2017, the first WORM solution addressing durable medium was implemented in Bank Pekao S.A. In March 2018, Hitachi supplied WORM storage to Bank Zachodni WBK S.A.

Tadeusz Woszczyński, Country Manager, Poland, states: “WORM storage is a safe and reliable solution and, what is more, it allows the banks to solve the durable medium issue in a quick and adequate way. We are happy that the biggest players in the Polish banking market appreciate the functionality and advantages of our solution.”

The Hitachi WORM storage solution is based on Hitachi Content Platform (HCP),  which has been used by some of the world’s biggest banks for regulatory and ‘paperless’ projects, as well as for creating a private cloud within the organisation itself. HCP provides a range of data security technologies which enable banks to reduce governance and compliance costs in today’s regulated banking sector. These features include: built-in support for WORM, data retention, encryption, authentication, access controls, digital shredding, and auditing as well as support for seamless migration of the solution to new generations of hardware. For many years HCP has been considered as a leading object storage solution by the foremost independent industry analyst organisations, such as Gartner and IDC. Dariusz Janik, Country Manager, Hitachi Vantara Poland confirms: “Hitachi Content Platform is our core product in the area of content storage, for years being placed among the highest ranked products in Gartner’s reports”.

HCP can also be used by banks as safe data storage, adhereing to the MIFID2 regulation mandating that all email communication and phone records must be archived and accessible on demand for a five-year period. Additionally, WORM storage-enabled HCP helps financial institutions to reduce compliance costs associated with various regulations, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements which govern data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union.

 Technologies that focus on durable medium demonstrate Hitachi’s commitment to social innovation and to delivering solutions that connect products, services and advanced IT knowledge that contribute to society.