Aleph Archives
Delivering Next-Gen Web Archiving

It was just another day for the employees of a multinational bank that takes pride in its ability to offer the most competitive interest rates. But, the ambiance of the office soon changed when a disgruntled client visited the financial institution, accusing the bank of publishing inaccurate interest rates on their website. Fortunately, the financial institution had deployed an advanced web archiving solution that allowed the bank manager to review the history of the published rates on their website and disprove the client’s allegation. Thus, the bank was able to successfully uphold its reputation in front of its employees, customers, and the financial market at large. Conversely, in cases where banks cannot disprove such accusations, they have to incur huge fines. And, the core tenet of the multinational bank’s success in defending its online footprint was Switzerland-based Aleph Archives.

“This scenario is but one example of how critical web archiving has become in helping digital organisations safeguard their online presence and comply with the ever-evolving data regulations,” says Younès Hafri, founder and CTO at Aleph Archives. Driven by this requisite, the company has developed solutions that offer the highest web archiving quality while staying simple and intuitive for its clients.

Hafri’s interest in simplifying web archiving began in 2004, when he was a Ph.D. student at Polytech Nantes (France). Back then, web archiving was primarily open source-based, tedious for non-technical users, and required an enormous amount of time and effort to implement successfully. With a vision to create a simple and high-quality web archiving solution for businesses, Hafri founded Aleph Archives in 2010.

The first generation of the company’s web archiving system was CAMA, which was developed to aid organisations in capturing web content in its native format using Aleph Archives’ web bots (crawlers), storing the collected data in the WARC ISO file format, and facilitating the playback of archived content. Furthermore, the solution was one of the first web archiving solutions that could be deployed on the cloud and/or on-premise, and allowed clients to maintain anonymity if they wanted to.

“This emphasis on cloud integration and privacy, combined with our positive approach to customer feedback, helped us improve our web archiving solutions with unmatched flexibility over the years,” adds Hafri.

Today, the company offers KEN, its second-generation web-archiving platform, which offers advanced archiving and e-discovery capabilities that go beyond CAMA. In addition, KEN complies with stringent regulations such as US-based FINRA guidelines, UK-based FCA’s policies, along with the frameworks laid out by EU-based GDPR and MiFID II, and Swiss-based Art. 149 KAG. Abiding by these policies enhances KEN’s application in e-discovery cases involving brand infringement, intellectual property theft, defamation, anti-counterfeiting, and more. Additionally, unlike other alternatives that cannot effectively archive social media due to limitations of social media programming APIs, KEN helps users create web archive the exact copies of their online versions. “Above all, KEN’s easy-to-use interface and seamless archiving process deliver a smooth, clean, and simple user experience for our clients,” states Hafri. KEN archives ~50 million web pages on a daily basis without the need for any human interaction. This is the reason why the largest insurance firms, luxury brands, consumer goods corporations, advertising companies, and banks are Aleph Archives’ customers.

To extend its unparalleled web archiving functionalities to users that do not have extensive archiving needs, Aleph Archives has built a free, smaller, and lighter version of KEN—RAY. “This free version delivers the same unparalleled archiving capabilities of KEN to students, researchers, universities, journalists, police departments, and companies with smaller budgets,” mentions Hafri.

At the centre of both, KEN and RAY’s superior archiving capability and relatively low requirement for computing power is Erlang/OTP—the programming language that is used in the popular instant messaging app, WhatsApp. “Erlang/OTP is our secret-sauce as it drives flexibility and robustness, which allows us to add new features quickly, ensure high archiving quality, and maximize fault-tolerance capacity in all our products,” explains Hafri.

Looking ahead, Aleph Archives plans to incorporate AI and blockchain into KEN and expand its functionalities further. With AI, KEN’s crawlers will gain the ability to detect crawler traps and interact with forms intended for humans, thereby enhancing the archiving coverage. As a result, KEN will be able to access the dark web and record criminal activities for law enforcement agencies. Secondly, with blockchain, KEN will be able to ensure non-repudiation of data stored in the WARC ISO file format by extending the storage capability to a global distributed ledger. “Keeping in line with these upgrades, our main goal has always been, is, and will remain at simplifying web archiving solutions and deliver it to our clients seamlessly and cost-effectively,” concludes Hafri.