Compliance and security have always been important considerations for business leaders. Organizations need the right strategy for staying compliant to preserve trust among customers, protect the company from regulatory fines, and eliminate auditing issues.
Unfortunately, maintaining high levels of compliance and security isn’t as simple as it once was. Today’s communication landscape naturally distributes data across various unified communications platforms and tools. At the same time, workforces are becoming increasingly dispersed, leading to the adoption of new platforms for conversations and collaboration.
A compliance and security suite can assist businesses in keeping track of potential risks, policy issues, and data breaches across their communication landscape. Most brands’ challenge is finding the product with the best results for their business. Here’s how organizations can boost their chances of making the correct decision.
Step 1: Assess your Company’s Needs
The first step in choosing the correct compliance and security tool is determining the business’s compliance and security issues. Each organization is subject to specific regulations and requirements according to its location and sector.
For instance, in the healthcare space, brands need to ensure their data storage strategies follow the rules of HIPAA. In the financial space, there are regulations like PCI and PII compliance to consider. The proper compliance and security product will offer excellent compliance coverage tailored to each industry. Some solutions even have built-in templates and automated workflows designed to help users more easily identify risks associated with SEC, FINRA, FCA, GDPR, and MiFID II.
While considering the regulatory requirements of their industry, companies should also think carefully about the unique security issues their teams might encounter. For instance, brands using mobile messaging strategies heavily will need to consider tools with specific functionality for mobile data capture and management. Those with hybrid and remote teams must consider how distributed employees could lead to new security challenges.
Step 2: Look for Comprehensive Data Capture
While every business is different, most companies invest more heavily in diverse and comprehensive communication strategies for employees and customers. Increasingly, we’re seeing brands rely not just on audio conversations but also video, text, and SMS.
As such, it’s essential to ensure the right compliance and security solution can capture and assess different data forms. The most powerful platforms will ensure companies can detect corporate risk issues and regulatory problems across video, audio, and text documents. Some solutions can even spot issues by assessing static images.
Make a list of all the communication a company uses and the content they’re likely to create, from visual images displayed through a webcam to group and one-on-one chats in collaboration tools. This should help highlight which data capture forms are most important to the business.
Step 3: Prioritize Integrations
To ensure end-to-end compliance, business leaders need to ensure they can collect data from multiple ecosystems and environments and align it in a central space. A comprehensive compliance and security tool will be able to integrate with all the solutions business leaders are already using for communication, marketing, and other processes. For instance, many brands will need to ensure their compliance system integrates with their collaboration and video applications such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, RingCentral, and Zoom.
Marketing teams must ensure their software can work seamlessly alongside tools like Facebook, YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo. It’s also worth looking for integrations with archiving tools and cloud environments to quickly and efficiently collect data from multiple landscapes. A comprehensive integration landscape will reduce the risk of data silos and gaps when companies review their compliance performance.
Step 4: Consider Auditing and eDiscovery Needs
A comprehensive compliance platform should make it easier to collect data and organize it according to the needs of reviewers and auditing teams. Look for a vendor with access to a secure platform where businesses can store all their recordings, scripts, videos, and audio in one place. The right solution should include built-in security measures for protecting data and minimizing leaks, such as managed encryption keys.
At the same time, the archiving and storage solutions offered by compliance and security vendors also need to provide comprehensive control over the lifecycle of all data collected. Businesses need to be able to choose how files are managed as they age. These tools should also make it easy to adhere to external auditing requests and policy changes.
Step 5: Explore Intelligent Features
A suitable security and compliance tool simplify managing risk for businesses from all backgrounds. One of the best ways to do this is with access to intelligent tools capable of automatically detecting policy issues and alerting team members when problems arise.
Intelligent systems built into compliance platforms can leverage natural language processing and machine learning to rapidly identify security, conduct, privacy, and regulatory risks according to automated workflows and policies. Leading tools allow companies to set up custom policies or leverage existing automated templates to minimize the amount of work attributed to team members.
Additionally, these tools can also provide tips and assistance to team members responsible for reviewing data according to business requirements. Built-in risk scoring and intelligent insights save businesses time and money on compliance.
Step 6: Focus on Security by Design
Finally, when choosing a compliance and security product, it’s crucial to ensure the vendor responsible for the solution has built their ecosystem according to the latest standards. Focus on seeking out vendors with audited technology proven to adhere to current regulations.
Many leading solutions will be able to demonstrate their quality with certifications from leaders like the Cloud Security Alliance “STAR” program. Many solutions have also achieved SOC 2 certifications and ISO 27001 approval thanks to their comprehensive suite of secure solutions.
It’s also worth exploring how data is handled and managed by the solution you choose. The best tools should be able to promise comprehensive encryption for all data in transit and at rest and extensive access controls. The vendor’s reputation and background in building their system to be “secure by design” should contribute to your peace of mind.
“Supporting the multiple communications channels that exist in unified communications is at the forefront of organizations needs today in considering compliance and security solutions,” said Rich Sutton, CTO and co-founder of Theta Lake. “While paramount, there are additional layers of critical infrastructure and security to consider in order to manage, detect and respond to threats in those channels,” he continued. “Theta Lake Risk and Compliance Suite delivers the assurance that scalability and security are addressed. Theta Lake’s SOC 2, Type 2-audited Compliance Suite is a purpose-built platform that provides automatic detection of regulatory, privacy, and cybersecurity risks in audio, video, chat and other collaboration content. We also use patented AI and NLP techniques to detect and highlight risks in what is written, shared, and shown in collaborative messaging across over 80+ built-in policies for acceptable use risks, data privacy, and regulatory risks, as well as supporting automated custom detections”, said Sutton.
Links:
Archiving Electronic Communications in Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Teams Meetings
Break through compliance barriers in Microsoft Teams
