Compliance Recording and Analytics for Microsoft Teams

UC Today's Rob Scott hosts Dr. Gerald Kromer, CEO at ASC Technologies and Katrin Henkel, President of ASC Americas

So how are enterprises coping with staying compliant in this in this new world?

Dr Gerald Kromer
I mean, the trend to the cloud. And the take up of Teams was in place even before COVID-19. But what we saw really, in the last 18/24 months, is an absolute acceleration of that trend. The prices, public institutions, doing everything to enable their workforce to be able to productively work from anywhere, basically, right from home from mobile, wherever. And for that, Teams. It’s just such a strong tool. So that is, and that’s the one thing we’re seeing what amazed me, personally. My mandate is clearly to bring ASC into the cloud, and that started five years ago. And the first few years weren’t so successful. I started talking to our customers in trying to understand where they’re not moving to the cloud. And I remember one conversation with this chief strategy officer of a Swiss bank, where he would tell me, look, Gerald, I will take my communication to the cloud, as soon as Microsoft has its Azure Data Centre in Switzerland.

Katrin Henkel
And this is exactly what we are seeing now on a global scale. So Microsoft Azure is considered really as a secure infrastructure and also in the financial industry, and especially in analogous to Microsoft Cloud for financial services, this is the case. So we see how fast the perception of our customers has changed during the last few years. So this was not expected at all from our side.

Dr Gerald Kromer
And to come back to your question, Rob. Teams take up is one piece. The other question is for regulated customers, how do I stay compliant? Clearly those customers need capabilities beyond the basic onboard teams recording. And kudos to Microsoft for that. They realise that very early on my first conversation with Microsoft, they were saying, for us to be able to win finance customers, we need a compliance API. So they started the development of the API in 2018 and ASC together with two other competitors actually joined that as software development partners with Microsoft as early as 2018. And that is what we see with our customers, right? Our customers in that business, they look for certainty. They look for a certified solution, and they look for a proven solution. That is actually where we benefit.

From actually working on this, since like I said, 2018. That’s really what’s happening in the market, right? We see large institutions, large financial institutions, several 1000 users down to small institutions like 10 users, rolling out compliance for Teams alongside the team’s role in sometimes the regulator helps, quite frankly, right. In some markets, we have the regulator actually reminding the financial institutions that they need compliance as their robotics.

Katrin Henkel
That’s right, Sherrod. And he initially really focused mainly on the financial market, because of the regulations we saw. But now customers from all industry has come to come on board from healthcare or from utility. And even from the from the public sector, AC customers asking for our solution and implementing it already. So this was also a surprise for us. And because they also see the additional benefit of the analytics functionality they have now with Microsoft Cognitive Services

What are the top challenges you’re seeing amongst your customers?

Dr Gerald Kromer
There is a lot of challenges, right? Then I guess the good news is all of those can be navigated, right. I mean, clearly, there’s some technical some process challenge. I believe the most the biggest challenge for the CEOs at this moment is speed. Right? I mean, clearly, they’re managing a title change in terms of work environment. And they got to be quick in doing that, they got to be quick in defining the communication infrastructure of the future. And obviously, alongside that, they need to decide what does the recording and compliance infrastructure of the future look like? If they don’t do that? If they don’t do that, in parallel, they risk high fines, because regulators are pretty closely looking at this topic, right? So my recommendation is always make recording and compliance, an integral part of your team’s migration don’t make it an afterthought.

Another challenge we’re seeing is we’re seeing some customers, not using the full potential of teams, right? I mean they’re kind of using an existing on-premise PBX infrastructure and just laying over Teams as a chat platform. And that is not leveraging the full potential of Teams. And it doesn’t allow us to leverage the full potential of recording and compliance as a cloud service.

Katrin Henkel
For my side, there’s also a cultural aspect to look at it. So it’s not just a shift of a technology. So it’s a shift of company culture, as well. So therefore, communication is king, I can only recommend that you take all your team members on board on your journey, and you start this journey. So one part of it is that it and communication departments were strictly separate before, and now they work together. So you have now all the people to get on board and security aspects around Teams platform have to be validated by all the team members very early on stage. So all the stakeholders need to be on board to change as an organisation. And also, what you have to keep in mind is that users don’t want to use technology, they just want to have support for their daily work. So they would like to have seamless processes and more efficiency in their daily work. And this is what you have to keep in mind and also to communicate with your users.

What advice would you give to any organisation looking to move their communications and contact centre infrastructure into Microsoft Teams?

Dr Gerald Kromer
Well, I guess your question implies the answer, right? It doesn’t necessarily have to be complex. When we incepted ASC Recording Insights. Our mission was really to make recording and compliance for Microsoft Teams. easy. Easy for the compliance officer, easy for the user, easy for the system admin actually. So we really focused on making it easy to use for the end-users, for the compliance officers but making it part of UI. Recording Insights is really an integral part of the team’s UI as it is a native Teams, right? It’s an integral part of Teams of the Azure Active Directory that allows the compliance officer to find rights, rules and regulations on a group and a user level. The same really applies for the system admin, right? I mean, system admin, ease of deployment, ease of support, as a cloud service, we can set this up in hours, I literally had banks call me saying, Gerald, I have the regulator on my back, because I’m using teams. I know I don’t have compliance today. How quickly can you set this up? And my answer would be, well, how quickly can you contract? Because technically, I can have you live tomorrow. I’m sure your legal guys will take more time than that. But technically, you can be live tomorrow, right? It’s a cloud service. There is no deployment, there is no installation, there is no setup. It’s the provisioning of an existing cloud service.

Katrin Henkel
My advice would really be to leverage the entire technology. And we talked a lot about compliance recording and using this in a regulated market, because this is recommended and required but beyond that other technologies are available right now, which provides much more efficiency for organisations. Like we use Microsoft Cognitive Services for analytics. So this provides valuable insights into communication with your customers and gives you hints about your compliance risk in your organisation. So my advice would really be too relevant to leverage this to also fulfil your regulations in the market. So our customers have relations like FINMA MiFID, FCA Dodd-Frank, and this is like, you have to fulfil this and to have the entire corporate communication in scope. With analytics, it’s very easy to cover the entire communication and to find a risk overall, and not just on a specific point.

Would you mind talking us through a little bit about the ASC solution? Yeah. Tell us about how you approach Microsoft Teams compliance?

Dr Gerald Kromer
Sure, sure. We touched upon it from many angles, right? Makes sense to summarise that. Look, it’s like I mentioned, Rob, it’s a native team’s app and that is actually more important than the two words imply, right? If you if anybody watching this, go on Teams, on your left column, there’s three little dots at the bottom, click those dots, you get to the Team’s app store. And then enter recording, there will be just one compliance recording and analytics app coming up. And that is ASC Recording Insights. Because like I said, we from the beginning chose to make this native Teams run as a pure Azure service, fully integrated into the Active Directory like I said, that allows you to manage your rules and entitlements fully on the AD level.

Plus, it has a nice side effect actually on a recording level, there is no personal data, except for the Azure identify, which nobody can really use. Right. Teams is not voice, it is not a PBX replacement. So we clearly make sure we treat all media identical voice, chat, screen and video. This is a 360 degree combined solution. We focus on fast and easy provisioning. Fast and easy expansion. We have some Katrin’s customers saying I want to turn on my Hong Kong office. We can do that again within hours. Because of the service we go, Azure goes. And we leverage all the nice capabilities that Azure gives you. We have service clusters on a geo-redundancy scale that the largest corporates globally would actually consider building for themselves. The same in terms of encryption security, we use the Azure onboard encryption, we layer an ASC level of encryption on top of that, and that can be a C key it can be customer keys, we provide flexibility to absorb storage, it can be gas warehouse or storage can even be on-premise. What is important is that we quality assure the full chain from the team’s meeting point, through the capture through, the processing and through the storage. The whole chain is monitored and is assured, if anything along that chain breaks, we alarm it. And on top of that, like Katrin just mentioned, we layer on top compliance policies, the grab, I mean, we’ve I’ve played quite a bit in my career with AI engines, what Microsoft Cognitive Services provides to you is just beautiful, and it’s powerful. And we use that to provide compliance. AI on top of anything we record.

Katrin Henkel
I would just like to summarise because in a nutshell, Recording Insights is just a Teams app that securely captures the entire communication within Teams, and makes sure that our customers stay compliant with all the legal regulations. And in a very, very easy way, as Gerald just explained, from onboarding until us, so it’s very easy and very secure.

CCaaS Microsoft Teams Security and Compliance