EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation

Retention obligations are easy to state and expensive to meet, because the cost is in keeping the record queryable rather than merely stored. Audit events land in columnar storage on immutable object storage, so a multi-year window costs object-storage prices and is still searchable in seconds when an examiner asks for a sample. Each record carries a verification hash, so what you produce years later is demonstrably what was written at the time.

Continuous scanning checks each engine and version against known CVEs, missing patches, end-of-life versions, and hardening benchmarks, and extends to the network: exposed listeners, unexpected reachability, weak TLS, and drift from the documented baseline. Findings rank by exploitability and by the classification of the data at risk, so the same CVE sits differently in the queue on classified data than on a development copy — and the scan history is the evidence that the control operated continuously rather than quarterly.

A record of processing is only as good as the layer producing it. Real-time SQL auditing captures every statement against the data — the identity, the session, the client, the objects touched, the outcome — with no nightly batch window where activity goes unrecorded. Classification is what makes that a record of *regulated* data rather than a log of everything: it tells you which tables are in scope, so the register describes the processing you actually have to declare. Policy templates then produce it in the shape the framework asks for, instead of leaving you to assemble it from raw logs the week before an inspection.

A continuity requirement asks two different things, and only one of them is a database control. The recovery plan, the failover drill, and the tested restore are yours. What is produced here is the evidence layer under them: backups and exports are hashed and baselined alongside the datafiles, so a backup that was silently truncated, moved, or never written is evident rather than discovered at the restore. Audit events land in columnar storage on immutable object storage with a verification hash per record, so the history survives the incident that made you need it and is still queryable in seconds afterwards. Collection failure is itself an alerting condition, which is what evidences that the record was continuous rather than merely intended to be.