Shield, a leading provider of AI-powered digital communications governance and archiving (DCGA) technology, today announced major enhancements to Shield Archive, introducing new capabilities designed to help financial institutions modernize legacy archives while meeting increasing regulatory demands.
Directly addressing one of the most pressing challenges facing financial institutions today—modernizing archive infrastructure without increasing risk, operational complexity, and costs—the latest release is designed to remove these barriers that have historically slowed transformation. Shield Archive introduces intelligent storage tiering and expanded governance controls alongside proven enterprise-scale migration, allowing firms to modernize and become AI-ready without compromising data integrity, accessibility, or compliance.
“Archive modernization has been constrained by migration risk, rising long-term costs, and limited control over data,” said Ofir Shabtai, CTO, 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.”
These enhancements build on a strong, cloud-native foundation, with Shield scoring as a Top 3 vendor for Archive Platforms in the 2025 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving.
New Intelligent Storage Tiering for Scalable Cost Efficiencies
As data volumes continue to grow, storage cost and accessibility remain key challenges for regulated firms. Shield Archive introduces a new hot/cold storage offering, delivering up to 50% cost efficiencies on data storage without sacrificing accessibility or compliance, helping organizations lower long-term retention costs at scale.
Frequently accessed data remains instantly searchable, while infrequently accessed data is optimized for lower-cost storage—without losing metadata visibility or regulatory readiness. On-demand retrieval ensures records can be quickly and temporarily restored for investigations or audits, supporting operational efficiency while maintaining compliance with global regulations including SEC 17a-4, CFTC, FINRA, and MiFID II. Intelligent data classification and usage patterns further optimize how data is tiered and accessed over time.
Transfer Historical Data at Pace and Scale
Migration continues to be one of the most significant blockers to archive modernization, often introducing risk around data loss, broken lineage, and regulatory exposure. Shield Archive removes this barrier by enabling secure, enterprise-scale migration into a trusted, compliant archive foundation.
Proven at scale, the platform supports multi-petabyte transfers on customer timelines with verified, audit-grade completeness, executing migrations exceeding 9 petabytes, covering over 50 billion records across 40 systems, and processing more than 70 billion records annually with throughput of up to 60TB per day. Rated by Gartner as a Top 3 Vendor for the connectivity use case, it supports migration from a wide range of legacy and modern systems.
Once migrated, data is preserved as a complete, consistent, and defensible record—ready for compliance, audits, and investigations, with robust validation and reconciliation processes ensuring data integrity and completeness at scale.
Expanded Governance, Legal Hold, and Supervisory Control
As regulatory scrutiny increases, governance and control over retained data have become critical for compliance and legal teams. Shield Archive introduces expanded governance and legal hold capabilities, giving teams greater control, visibility, and confidence across retention and preservation workflows.
The latest enhancements in legal hold functionality provide comprehensive visibility into preserved data scope and policy details, supporting faster assessments and more informed decision-making. Bulk policy management allows teams to configure and deploy legal holds at scale through self-service controls, reducing operational delays and removing reliance on vendor intervention. AI-powered insights further support faster identification and assessment of relevant data during investigations and legal review.
Built for regulatory-grade compliance, Shield Archive delivers secure, single-tenant, immutable write once, read many (WORM) storage with policy-driven retention, flexible global data residency, and full auditability across the data lifecycle. With no export fees, no exit fees, and full data accessibility, organizations retain complete ownership and control of their communications data. As part of a unified, cloud platform, it provides a trusted foundation for governing data from ingestion through investigation—ensuring every record remains preserved, accessible, and defensible, supported by AI-driven workflows across the data lifecycle.
