Bloomberg Quietly Launches Cloud-Based E-Mail/IM Archiving Service; Uses Biometric Authentication

From a Financial Times Article:

Bloomberg, the financial data and news group, is looking to use the expertise gleaned from managing the messaging service on its familiar black terminals to tap that growing demand. Its experience shows the sheer scale of the challenge facing companies contemplating their message archiving options: Bloomberg’s 300,000 subscribers already send about 200m e-mail messages a day and 12m instant messages over what it calls the world’s largest private network.

Having invested in the storage capacity to manage this volume of business-critical messages, little over a year ago it quietly opened up its archiving system under the brand of Bloomberg Vault. That virtual lock-box now contains some 55bn e-mails from about 240 companies.

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The private company refuses to share financial data about the service, but claims to be able to reduce customers’ archiving costs.

Bloomberg’s Vault is a virtual one, a private “cloud” of data centres that it owns and operates itself. Access is not by a combination lock but using biometric authentication technologies – each user logs in with his or her fingerprint. To guarantee uptime, Bloomberg has also had to invest in redundant capacity for disaster recovery.

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