Documentary compliance is no longer a luxury reserved for large corporations. With NIS2, DORA and the strengthening of GDPR, all organisations must be able to prove the integrity, history and auditability of their data — including mid-caps and SMEs, which rarely have the budgets and teams of enterprise accounts.
The false dilemma of compliance
For a long time, mid-caps and SMEs have faced a difficult choice: invest heavily in digital vault solutions designed for banks and insurers, or cobble together fragile internal workarounds while waiting for the next audit.
Neither of these two options stands up to current requirements.
Regulators are no longer simply asking:
Do you have a backup?
They also ask:
Can you prove the exact state of this document on a specific date, and demonstrate that it has not been altered?
What mid-caps and SMEs truly need to cover
- the systematic versioning of critical documents;
- the immutability of evidence;
- the traceability of access and modifications;
- export capabilities for an auditor or regulator;
- granular restoration in the event of an incident.
These five capabilities constitute the minimum foundation of modern compliance, regardless of the sector.
Why cost should no longer be an obstacle
Modern time-vault solutions rely on S3 storage, which has become a commodity. The additional cost associated with traceability and immutability is marginal compared to the storage itself.
The primary investment is no longer in infrastructure; it lies in the software's ability to organise, archive, and present evidence in an actionable manner.
The KARL approach
KARL enables mid-caps or SMEs to deploy a corporate-grade documentary chain:
- on their own S3 storage (sovereign or cloud);
- without an intermediate database server;
- with native historisation;
- and at a cost aligned with the actual volume of data retained.
The result: auditable, demonstrable, and financially sustainable compliance, even with a lean IT team.
Find out more
The Challenges article explains temporal storage and KARL’s approach:
Read the Challenges article on KARL →