Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Digital transformation for FinServ organizations with Smarsh and AWS (PEN101)

Summary

• Smarsh, a company with over 20 years of experience, specializes in managing digital communications for regulatory compliance and risk mitigation, primarily serving the financial services sector.
• Patrick Palomo, VP of Solutions Engineering and Architecture, and Blake Sherwood, Director of Delivery Engineering, presented Smarsh's solutions and partnership with AWS.
• Smarsh's platform captures various digital communications, centralizes them in a data warehouse, and provides applications for archiving, supervision, surveillance, and compliance.
• The platform is designed to handle the increasing volume of data, evolving regulatory landscape, and the need for comprehensive digital communication strategies.
• AWS supports Smarsh with high availability, data residency, scalability, and security, enabling rapid deployment and management of services across multiple regions.
• Smarsh leverages AWS features like EC2 auto-scaling and intelligent tiering for S3 to ensure cost-effective and efficient operations.
• The company emphasizes the importance of agility in releases and updates, with 7,500 changes and 250 releases in the previous month.
• Smarsh offers a fully integrated platform that can be adopted incrementally, supporting customers through their digital transformation journey.
• The session concluded with a Q&A, addressing concerns about storage, data movement costs, and the importance of managing expenses even for regulatory compliance solutions.

Insights

• The exponential growth of digital data and the complexity of regulatory requirements in the financial services industry necessitate robust solutions like Smarsh's platform, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure for scalability and flexibility.
• Smarsh's partnership with AWS is critical to their ability to provide a secure, resilient, and compliant service to their customers, highlighting the importance of cloud services in modern enterprise solutions.
• The ability to deploy and manage services rapidly across different regions is a significant advantage for Smarsh, demonstrating the value of cloud automation and infrastructure as code practices.
• The focus on cost management, even for essential regulatory compliance services, indicates a broader trend in the industry where all expenditures are scrutinized, emphasizing the need for efficient resource utilization and financial operations (FinOps) practices.
• The integration of advanced features like AWS's intelligent tiering for S3 suggests that cloud providers are continuously evolving to offer more sophisticated solutions to help companies like Smarsh manage data and costs effectively.
• The session's emphasis on the importance of APIs for extensibility and integration with other systems reflects a trend towards interoperability and modularity in software architecture.
• The high frequency of releases and changes at Smarsh underscores the agile approach to software development and delivery, which is becoming increasingly common in the industry to meet the fast-paced demands of customers and regulatory environments.