Many regulated organizations know they need to modernise communications governance and archiving, but fear of data loss and broken chain-of-custody often keeps them stuck on legacy platforms. With a preservation-first migration approach, firms can reduce risk, streamline compliance, and unlock new value from their records.
Across regulated industries, from healthcare and insurance to the public sector, organisations face a growing contradiction.
The systems they’ve relied on for communications compliance for years are quickly becoming their greatest vulnerability.
As legacy recording platforms approach end-of-support, many firms keep them running purely as historical data repositories, while deploying new tools to capture emerging communications. The result is an expanding patchwork of systems, formats, and disconnected data models – exactly the conditions that make records harder to retrieve when it matters most.
Unified communications governance and archiving platforms promise to simplify this landscape. Yet many organisations remain hesitant to take the next step, fearing that migrating sensitive records could introduce file corruption, loss, or a broken evidential trail.
But as Chris Reed, Head of Product and Technology at Wordwatch, argues those fears are often based on outdated assumptions:
“Once organizations understand that you don’t need to risk losing or corrupting data to make the transition, data migrations become far more accessible and appealing.”
Why Migration Fears Keep Organizations Paralyzed
Migration reluctance usually comes down to one question: Can we prove nothing changed?
Different recording systems store media in different ways, using different codecs and file structures. When legacy records are moved into a new platform, organisations worry that:
- the new system won’t fully support older file types
- records may be altered during ingestion or conversion
- metadata may not map cleanly across platforms
- they’ll have no practical way to verify integrity at scale
And verification is the point that often breaks projects. If a migration involves transforming records – re-encoding files, decrypting media, changing timestamps or metadata structures – organizations may then need to prove, record by record, that the migrated version is complete and accurate.
At the scale many organizations operate – potentially millions of interactions – that’s a major audit challenge, and a major opportunity for mistakes.
It also introduces real regulatory and legal exposure. If a firm cannot demonstrate integrity and lineage, it risks failed audits, enforcement action, or legal disputes where records are questioned.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Staying on unsupported infrastructure can feel like the safer option until it isn’t.
Unsupported systems often demand constant maintenance, patching workarounds, and specialist knowledge that becomes harder to retain over time. Some organisations find themselves in a position where powering down a legacy platform (for security or cost reasons) makes records effectively unreachable – until the moment an urgent request arrives.
Meanwhile, operational resilience expectations are increasing. If communications records are part of a firm’s compliance obligations, the infrastructure supporting them becomes part of the risk profile too.
The scale of these hurdles makes many companies feel they lack the resources to take on a migration project; Wordwatch’s own research found that this is an issue for 52% of businesses. As Reed says, this is compounded by the fact that “data and legacy system migrations aren’t seen as exciting projects, so they tend to lose out to higher-profile initiatives like AI.” Yet, many organizations are unaware that a migration can be made without the traditional codec compatibility issues, without requiring modification to fit new platforms, and without breaking the chain of custody that regulators require. This preservation-first approach substantially reduces both resources and risk.
An Assured Approach to Migration
To move forward, organisations need a migration method that reduces proof burden, rather than increasing it.
Wordwatch’s position is straightforward: preserve rather than transform.
Reed explains:
“At Wordwatch, our stance is that it’s better not to change anything, rather than have to prove that changes… were correctly and safely made.”
In practice, that means avoiding approaches that rely on ingesting and re-encoding legacy media. Instead, a preservation-first method focuses on:
- extracting and standardising metadata
- maintaining links to original records in their native format
- proving completeness through validation checks
- preserving chain-of-custody by design
This changes the migration conversation. Instead of asking organisations to accept transformation risk and then prove safety afterwards, the goal becomes simpler: keep the original record intact and make it governable and searchable through a unified layer.
Migration projects fail when they try to do everything at once.
A phased approach lowers the risk profile and builds organisational trust. Wordwatch’s methodology, as described by Reed, prioritises the highest-risk legacy system first, bringing its records under central governance and validating completeness before progressing.
Because records are preserved in their original format, organisations can demonstrate that nothing has been lost or altered – and they can keep legacy systems running alongside the new governance layer until they’re ready to retire them.
Reed also highlights the operational advantage: if you’re not transcoding and transforming media, migrations can move dramatically faster. Wordwatch moves only metadata rather than transcoding files, migrations can proceed up to sixty times faster than attempting than attempting to ingest and convert everything.
Reassuring Compliance and IT Teams
A successful migration isn’t just technical – it’s organisational.
Compliance teams need defensibility. IT teams need stability. Both need confidence that the process won’t create new risks.
A preservation-first, validation-led approach helps align those needs by:
- reducing the requirement to “prove a conversion was correct”
- strengthening audit readiness through consistent metadata and identity mapping
- enabling policy-driven retention and deletion to reduce over-retention exposure
- supporting legal holds so critical records are protected
- providing a single operational view for investigations and exports
For many firms, the end goal is what Reed calls an “evergreen” archive: a unified, vendor-neutral foundation that can connect to new capture technologies over time without repeating major migration projects.
Unlocking Strategic Value from Communications Data
Once communications records can be searched, governed, and investigated in a unified communications governance and archiving platform, capabilities that were previously impractical become operationally feasible.
For instance, transcription and voice attribution can be more easily applied en masse, adding greater context and richness to the communication data. As Reed explains, “Combine these capabilities, and you end up with a complete, largely text-based dataset that is ideal for feeding data pipelines and AI models.” This transforms the migration from a necessity into a strategic investment.
Taken together, these outcomes lower risk, reduce IT overhead, and free compliance and technology teams to focus on higher-value work. Migration stops being “just a compliance project.” It becomes an investment in operational efficiency, resilience, and future analytics.
Wordwatch also points to measurable outcomes from retiring legacy infrastructure – including examples of significant server and platform footprint reduction (in some cases around 90%, according to Reed’s client experience), alongside reduced IT overhead and faster investigations.
For regulated organizations, modernising communications governance isn’t optional – it’s becoming a prerequisite for defensible compliance and resilient operations.
The good news, Reed argues, is that migration doesn’t have to mean transformation risk.
Ready to explore how unified compliance platforms can transform your communications governance and archiving? Learn more about Wordwatch’s approach to consolidating fragmented data at wordwatch.io.
