The topic of regulatory compliance may not exactly be exciting, but when one of our financial services customers came to us with the requirement of secure messaging of all user communication to a message vault, it became clear that the need to store electronic communications for business related purposes doesn’t just stop at email anymore. Many organizations have already started injecting other types of communications—ESNs like Salesforce Chatter or Yammer, for example—into their infrastructure and day-to-day business. Because of the regulations that govern certain industries, the obligation to store and archive these new types of message channels is just as important as more legacy types of communications, like email.
At Kindling, we love challenges and building tools and features to better serve the needs of our customers. When one of our financial services customers came to us with this requirement, I thought “Ah, I know how we can do that.” And we have an excellent platform to build from. Designing and implementing what we call our Vault Message Notification Service was pretty straightforward: we already had an extensive event architecture through which all messages flow, and we had a lot of experience with secure and redundant systems.
Every action in Kindling has meaning. It can include the simplest things like improving the employee experience, or more strategic issues concerning your current market or product offering. The collaboration that happens in Kindling is about the company’s future and consists of sensitive data, including intellectual property. Because of this, it’s important that this data is being protected and also being archived to the proper records management system. Every act of communication by an individual, every event of creating or modifying content within Kindling by a user, is encapsulated and documented in detail (as to author, the content itself, and metadata regarding time and its context within Kindling) and sent in an email message to a customer-specified endpoint. These events include, for example, the creation of an idea, the editing of an idea, or the deletion of an idea—in other words we’re representing not only an end state, but the state changes along the way. For the delivery of the message we use multiple, load-balanced and health-check monitored SMTP relays and send the messages over TLS to the customer’s endpoint email address.
We design and build the Kindling platform with the highest standards of customer privacy and security in mind—all Kindling data is encrypted in transit, our infrastructure is highly redundant and resilient, and our application has rich features for managing intellectual property — so it should be no surprise that the Vault Message Notification Service was architected and built to the same standards.
Incidentally, the event architecture I mentioned above is an aspect of what I call opportunity-oriented architecture, those aspects of a system architecture which address a changing market and new requirements; the features of opportunity-oriented architecture are strategic, address medium- to long-term needs, and organizational demands on a developmental and global level. Like I said: we love challenges.