Now boasting over 280 million monthly active users, Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular communication, collaboration and productivity solutions.
Ideal for those embracing the age of hybrid and flexible work, Microsoft Teams offers an excellent combination of flexibility and convenience. It’s easy to use, works well with the tools many employees rely on daily, and can scale to suit virtually any business.
However, as companies scale more of their processes into Microsoft Teams, one crucial question still needs to be answered: does the platform meet the varying compliance standards of organisations in a myriad of verticals?
Companies held to the high standards of regulations like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and MiFID II must ensure their transition into Teams won’t harm their compliance standing.
Does Microsoft Teams Support Compliance?
As a market leader in the UCaaS and technology landscapes, Microsoft has already taken steps to ensure users of the Teams platform can stay compliant. Specialist versions of Teams are available for government groups, which support data sovereignty requirements.
Teams users can also implement zero-trust authentication methods, set legal holds on data, and even explore sensitivity labels to keep information safe. Over the years, as Teams has grown in popularity, Microsoft’s approach to compliance has transformed too.
Today’s organisations can leverage everything from Information Barriers in Purview to Customer Keys and eDiscovery systems. Plus, Microsoft does allow companies to capture crucial information from conversations through in-built recording capabilities.
Unfortunately, it’s not a suitable solution for end-to-end compliance.
The Gaps in Microsoft Teams Compliance
While Microsoft Teams may provide the essential tools some companies need to remain compliant, it’s not built for the specific requirements of organisations in highly regulated industries. Companies in the financial services, insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing landscapes need specialised tools to securely capture and preserve data across a flexible landscape.
Microsoft Teams’ built-in recording and data management tools leave companies with significant compliance gaps to overcome, such as:
- Limited metadata: Compliance laws require many companies to capture not just conversational data but information about their recordings, too, such as when and where the conversation occurred. While Microsoft may be able to offer basic time stamps and agent IDs, it can’t capture all the metadata many businesses need.
- Restrictive recording and storage: Microsoft Teams can record meetings, but it’s not a dedicated compliance solution. It has no secure redaction solutions, and the storage options are somewhat limited. You may be unable to store information in the right geographic location for data sovereignty issues or create comprehensive backups of files.
- Increased complexity: Controlling who can see, edit, and access call recording data is essential in ensuring compliance. Unfortunately, setting up storage and permission settings within Teams can be time-consuming and complex. An external recording platform, on the other hand, allows for more granular permissions control.
- Collecting sensitive data: Microsoft Teams doesn’t offer redaction capabilities, which means companies can’t pick and choose which pieces of information to include in a recording and which to remove for security purposes. PCI-DSS and other compliance standards require companies to extract payment information and further details from recordings to preserve customer privacy and security. This can’t be done with Teams alone.
- Sharing data: For auditing, discovery, and other compliance purposes, data sometimes needs to be shared between two entities or environments. Sharing a file from Microsoft Teams isn’t as secure, simple, or private as using a comprehensive compliance recording solution. There’s no option to send encrypted links or restrict a recipient’s access to a file, preventing them from downloading or changing the contents.
How Do Companies Keep Microsoft Teams Compliant?
Ultimately, there’s more to maintaining compliance in Microsoft Teams than simply using the available tools. While Microsoft’s security, privacy, and data storage tools can benefit brands, they’re limited in ensuring ongoing compliance.
The only way to effectively bridge the gap is to leverage a compliant call recording solution. Microsoft has partnered with various vendors to enable access to fully native and integrated tools for comprehensive recording and file storage.
A compliant call recording solution certified for Microsoft Teams can help companies to bridge the compliance gaps in their strategy as they transition to a new digital landscape. Not only do these tools allow companies to capture crucial voice data, but they ensure companies can maintain compliance by capturing and securely storing video, voice, and screens simultaneously.
Ryan Kahan, CEO of CallCabinet explains: “The first step in understanding the business value of compliance is to ask, ‘What are the risks if we discover we are in breach of compliance?’ This question leads to uncovering many layers of potential vulnerability and exposure. Once these areas have been identified, the real business value of compliance becomes crystal clear.”
The challenge is choosing the right compliant call recording solution for your business and the various policy requirements across each department or team. While numerous options exist on the market today, the best solutions should always:
- Offer access to configurable recording capabilities, automatically enforced throughout the workforce and across every Microsoft Teams communication channel.
- Deliver compliant storage capabilities in the cloud, on-site – or both, with full end-to-end encryption and location-based controls for data sovereignty.
- Centrally store recordings to make them easier to manage with flexible access control, security, encrypted sharing, and long-term retention capabilities.
- Simplify searching for information with powerful phrase and keyword search solutions for reviews, security checks, dispute resolution, call tagging and training.
- Deliver innovative capabilities such as accurate speech-to-text transcription, speaker and cross-talk detection and even built-in sentiment and emotion analysis.
- Integrate with other communication tools and services to provide companies with a comprehensive audit trail of all communication system activity.
Don’t Compromise on Teams Compliance
Regulatory compliance requires a holistic data security, collection, and handling approach. Unfortunately, this functionality isn’t available as a native solution within Microsoft Teams.
Companies transitioning into the Teams landscape to create a comprehensive solution for UCaaS, CCaaS, and compliant collaboration, need a recording solution that bridges the gaps.
With an innovative and feature-rich compliant call recording service for Microsoft Teams, companies can take advantage of all the platform’s benefits without compromising compliance.
