For public sector employees, consumer messaging apps like Signal have become indispensable. Speeding up communication with colleagues and external partners, they bring convenience that traditional email or UC platforms cannot match.
Yet despite these benefits, Signal introduces critical governance gaps that these organizations cannot ignore. Signal, although marketed as secure, lacks enterprise controls for archiving or governance.
This makes it incapable of providing data for regulations like the Freedom of Information Act, MB Circular A-130, NARA Regulations, and the Federal Records Act, an essential feature for public sector communications. The platform also sits outside the UC infrastructure that public sector IT teams have built, meaning conversations taking place there occur without administrator oversight.
Taken together, these gaps expose public sector departments to risks ranging from data breaches to legal action and reputational damage. Banning the use of Signal might sound like a quick fix to this, but such policies are unlikely to be followed and could even disrupt employee workflows.
Instead, public sector IT leaders should seek solutions to bring these platforms under organizational control and harness the user experience that makes them effective.
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Why Signal Creates a UC Integration Problem
Signal’s compliance challenge stems from its design. As Avi Pardo, Co-Founder and CBO of LeapXpert, explains:
“This app is being used for official communication, but it’s not connected to any of the enterprise systems that would allow you to govern, archive, or apply policy to its conversations.”
Without integration into broader UC architecture, Signal provides no hooks into archiving systems, no centralized management console, and no way to enforce organizational policies.
This disconnect complicates record retrieval. When a legal request arrives, IT teams cannot pull Signal messages alongside other communications, which leaves them at regulatory risk over audit complications.
Beyond compliance, the lack of integration creates broader governance challenges. IT teams cannot apply identity management, data loss prevention (DLP), or policy controls to Signal as they do with other channels like email or Microsoft Teams.
Organizations also have no way to enforce who can use Signal for work purposes, what information can be shared, or how long conversations should be retained.
A practical solution to this disconnect lies in a federated governance model, which extends enterprise controls to consumer messaging without disrupting workflows.
The Federated Governance Model
By bringing consumer messaging apps into their existing communication infrastructure, public sector teams can bridge the governance gap. This integration is achieved through platform federation, a model where independent platforms agree to work together, sharing data and functionality through common protocols.
LeapXpert’s solution highlights this model in action. By sitting between the organization and external messaging applications, it can capture Signal communications and route them to the organization’s archiving, surveillance, eDiscovery, and records management systems.
For end users, this process all takes place seamlessly. If a government employee wants to communicate with an external party via Signal, they add the contact and select Signal as the preferred channel. The external party receives a one-time consent request explaining that communications will be captured for governance purposes. If they decline, the contact is not added. Once they accept, messages flow seamlessly: with the employee being able to interact with them through a front-end extension on a UC platform like Microsoft Teams, or via the native Signal app
This integration solves the archiving problem at its core. Signal conversations being routed through record-keeping and eDiscovery systems means compliance teams can retrieve these conversations alongside other records when legal requests arise. Not only does it do this for text conversations, but attachments and even metadata too, ensuring complete and defensible record of all interactions.
Because LeapXpert captures conversations in the cloud at the platform level, not on individual apps or devices, this also enables full compliance across corporate, BYOD, and mixed device deployments.
Beyond archiving, LeapXpert’s integration adds further controls that increase governance of Signal. Pardo explains:
“We are able to integrate into Microsoft Entra ID, and based on that, we are able to define the level of DLP.”
Pardo explains. Through this, administrators can govern Signal communications, restricting it to authorized employees and approved external users.
This integration also enables real-time DLP and role-based controls. Organizations can define what information is shareable by role and seniority. Group chat governance adds oversight, controlling who can create groups, assign administrators, and revoke access in case of role changes or departures.
By treating Signal as another data stream within an existing compliance system, LeapXpert extends UC architecture rather than replacing it. UC teams gain governed access to a platform employees already use, without deploying new infrastructure or retraining staff.
Making Signal Governance a Priority
Consumer messaging in the public sector is here to stay. Employees increasingly need fast, mobile communication to meet modern work demands.
It’s for these reasons Pardo believes governance of consumer messaging is now essential.
“This is not a nice-to-have anymore. If you’re in the public sector and you’re using these channels, you need to be able to demonstrate that you can govern them.”
The federated governance model answers this requirement. Signal conversations gain the same visibility, control, and compliance as Teams chats and emails. UC teams can then manage all channels through a single identity system, a unified policy framework, and one archive.
Find out more about how LeapXpert’s solutions can keep your company compliant.
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