The remote working trend and usage of UC tools continues to accelerate due to the current environment and these recent months have provided validation that this is a fundamental shift of how we will work in the future.
Indeed, because of its sheer ubiquity, along with its federated nature, email will always be a part of the business communications matrix, however, the shift and preference for information sharing using modern collaboration tools is increasingly apparent. The core UC features such as the ability to screen share, use webcam, whiteboard, share documents in chat that have driven a proliferation in usage of video conferencing and collaboration chat while simultaneously creating additional security and compliance risks associated with data leakage, misconduct, and acceptable use when using these platforms.
“Identifying compliance issues across all communication channels is a challenge for legacy compliance and archiving solutions. Employees are well aware of existing compliance tools in place to monitor and archive email, driving the phrase – “don’t put that in an email”. This creates an incentive to move the highest risk conversations and broader data sharing to richer mediums like video conferencing and chat, such as holding a document in front of a webcam, sharing sensitive information through screen share, or sharing rich media through chat, all creating serious gaps in an organization’s ability to identify data exposure and misconduct”, commented Anthony Cresci, VP of Business Development and Operations at Theta Lake.
Theta Lake and Mimecast have partnered to address those challenges, providing a tightly integrated and unified archiving and compliance experience for all communication mediums, including email and unified communications. This partnership supports remote work enablement, allowing companies to confidently use all of the rich communication and information sharing features of collaboration tools without concern for blind spots.
Archiving across all communications
In today’s business world though, email is one small part of the blend of communications requiring supervision. Integrating Theta Lake’s AI-based compliance and risk management suite with Mimecast means that Mimecast Cloud Archive customers can now benefit from a single cloud repository for all their communications — including full capture, retention, and automated risk identification for anything shared, shown, spoken or typed in Zoom Phone, Zoom Meetings, Zoom Chat, Webex Teams, Webex Meetings, Slack, RingCentral Office, Microsoft Teams (Chat, Calls, and Meetings), LogMeIn, BlueJeans, and many more.
This partnership centralises risk management for businesses, creating a single feature-rich application to monitor and mediate threats from both within and without — according to policies the user can create and deploy, based on the requirements of their particular organisation and industry. Theta Lake integrates AI with its patented NLP and Machine Learning detections that leverage object detection, image analysis, OCR, Transcription, and more to automate risk detection in video, voice, chat, and shared file content. That sophisticated and automated analysis, as well as each organization’s human compliance reviewer input, is passed to Mimecast Cloud Archive, providing improved surveillance along with a strong defence against data loss or privacy breach claims.
With more teams working in a distributed way for the longer term, even within highly regulated categories like finance and health, this unified approach will help both compliance and info security teams sleep better at night.
One archive, one search, immediate alerts
Creating a single searchable archive for all these diverse forms communications and content was a challenge, but the benefits are manifest, as Cresci explained, “You can perform eDiscovery across all communication channels, searching across risk scores, identified risks such as data leakage or acceptable use violations, as well as captured metadata on participants, dates, titles.
“In addition, when performing a search in Mimecast’s archive, if there is an audio, video, or chat record that you want to perform deeper analysis on, firms have access to Theta Lake’s purpose built UC player with built-in review and risk context to more efficiently and effectively review content.”
“With Theta Lake’s full coverage for video, voice, and chat, its Automated Risk Detection, and its complete review space, Mimecast customers can complete review and respond to incidents in less than half the time of the recorded and captured content itself. That can represent more than 3x time and resource saving while improving coverage and the ability to use key collaboration features”
This means that wherever the risk occurs, from an email attachment to a message in a collaboration platform or even screen share of a cloud-based HR application within a video conference, the combination of 100% supervision, intelligent analysis, and prompt human review, means that mediation and remedy can be provided in record time – ensuring the most secure and compliant communications for all your users, wherever they are working.
