During an audit, FINRA will surely perform an electronic records request. This request is a sample data set from the firms archive. For instance, the auditor will request historical emails from one or more registered reps, from a certain time data in PST format, they will also ask for a sample of the books and records in their native format, usually word, excel or PDF, or however the firm as decided to store their records.
Therefore, small firms must make sure the provider they have chosen as their D3P has the tools to quickly perform these requests so that historical data can be stored immediately for the FINRA rep. Ideally, these restores will be done from one centralized, secure web interface that the compliance officer can log into anytime, then down the requested data and save it to a password protected zip file which can be supplied to auditors on the spot.