There are operational issues which are common to many portal instances:
- Collating and publishing investor reports from multiple sources (whether internal or TPAs or other).
- Keeping a “source” copy of all documents posted into the cloud, along with their provenance. (Not so straightforward if you are letting other parties post their documents). There are two main issues here: i) resilience/recovery – we have looked at the time it takes platform providers to recover or restore and it is not a comforting picture: even less so at vulnerable times of year like quarterly reporting. ii) maintaining an auditable “book of record” or “catalogue of record” offline, under your own control to satisfy data controller obligations.
- Administering user access. It is not difficult to build up a significant number of users who need access to your output, of which 10-20% will change year-on-year. Further, the access permissions for another percentage will need maintaining.
- Data security – knowing who had potential access to what documents in the event of a potential breach. Potential breaches are not necessarily evident immediately. Track back and profile user access at a point-in-time.
- Archiving. Your document and data retention policies will apply as much to the portal as to your other repositories. Managing the retirement and possible off-boarding of data on the platform becomes a bigger issue, the bigger you are and the longer you use a portal.
- Helpdesk servicing. The greater the scale of operation, the greater the need to manage the inbound requests, report on progress/fulfilment, and use the traffic to identify issues on your platform. A well-organised service desk will improve data quality assurance and at the same time act as a quality controller as well as being a great source of operational data driving continuous improvement.
