Since the mass shift to remote working last March, organisations have been faced with the task of trying to ensure total security of their operations as their employees work from a vast array of home networks and infrastructures, while also making sure that all work is still compliant with governmental and industry regulations.
Now as companies adopt a hybrid way of working, those managers must consider the long-term practicalities of ensuring their organisations’ security remains consistent, whether their employees are in the office or at home.
We spoke with executives from Intrado, Tollring, and Theta Lake to discuss the challenges hybrid working presents to security and compliance, how they are helping customers address those challenges, and the new technologies that can help businesses maintain their security and compliance.
What challenges does hybrid working present from a security and compliance perspective?
Marc Gilman, General Counsel and VP of Compliance, Theta Lake:
“While hybrid work offers undeniable flexibility for employees, it introduces unique security and compliance challenges as organisations expand their use of the collaboration and chat platforms that are the backbone of remote environments.
“For example, the screen share, webcam, and whiteboard capabilities of platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex allow for interactive display and editing of information among meeting participants. Security and privacy risks arise when sensitive cloud-based applications like Quickbooks, Gusto, and Zoho are shared, which may contain sensitive data like email addresses, Social Security Numbers, birthdates, and account numbers.
“From a compliance perspective, understanding if employees are providing proper disclaimers, disclosures, and documentation like Form CRS through file transfers, chats, or screenshares is crucial”
Tony Martino, CEO of Tollring:
“With staff sitting on home networks accessing company information, the main challenge is to provide compliant solutions with information delivered securely.
“Workers’ privacy in the home is essential, particularly for sensitive industries. However, simply being in an informal, or more distracting environment (e.g. with children at home!) threatens workers’ ability to follow procedures and processes with the rigour they normally would in the office.
“It is therefore critical that the right policies are in place to protect those working from home and then structuring the processes correctly. For example, only the conversations that are pertinent to a person’s role should be recorded, and any personal calls excluded.”
How are you helping companies address these challenges?
Lev Deich, VP of Product Strategy, Intrado Life & Safety:
“In the case of hybrid workers, Intrado’s application allows for entry of “remote” locations when they are away from the office. These services can be provided directly to the enterprise managing its own voice system, or through service providers and carriers offering voice services such as SIP trunking and hosted telephony such as UCaaS.
“Intrado has a large team of public safety professionals dedicated sharing experience and expertise with organisations to ensure full compliance with all applicable federal and state laws, while keeping deployment and maintenance costs reasonable.”
Marc Gilman, General Counsel and VP of Compliance at Theta Lake:
“Theta Lake’s Security and Compliance Suite uses AI and machine learning to identify regulatory, privacy, and security risks across what was shared, spoken, and typed in collaboration and chat conversations. Our 70+ pre-trained detections examine every facet of a communication for potential risks.
“Theta Lake’s capabilities analyse content from modern chat applications like Slack and Teams for security and compliance risks, including emojis, animated gifs, reactions, and links included in messages. Theta Lake’s TranscriptionRN® technology normalises audio from Zoom, Webex, or voice recording platforms to detect compliance and security risks in context, even when words or phrases are mis-transcribed.”
Tony Martino, CEO of Tollring:
“Our services are developed with a cloud-first approach. This ensures all analytics and recordings are delivered with the highest security and do not breach standards or compliance”
“With cloud-based call recordings, organisations can control permissions and hone levels of access for sensitive information. Some users can be given read-only access, enabling them to listen to recordings but not share or download.
“This permission layer also ensures the right information is delivered to the right people so they can do their jobs, regardless of their location or the call journey.”
What new technologies should businesses be looking at as they prepare for the future?
Ian Pitts, SVP & General Manager, Intrado Life & Safety:
“It’s important for businesses to have the right tools to share timely information with the appropriate people. Unified mass notification solutions that offer multi-modal notification methods can help businesses streamline their entire emergency communication process by simultaneously alerting people located within and beyond the facility, initiate incident management protocols, and share critical safety information with PSAPs and first responders. But make sure there are various redundancy capabilities to avoid single points of failure so you won’t be left without notification options during a critical moment.”
Tony Martino, CEO of Tollring:
“Businesses must leverage analytics to empower decision making. When each part of an organisation has relevant data driven insights, businesses can ensure everyone is aligned with their strategic objectives. By unlocking valuable data, businesses can truly understand the customer experience and identify areas that need attention. Meaningful KPIs enable decision makers to track key metrics across the customer journey.
“Solutions that join up this experience (using APIs) across systems and processes provide a clear understanding of how the business deals with customers, suppliers and internally. APIs ensure information is passed securely across systems and enhance understanding of workflows.”
Marc Gilman, General Counsel and VP of Compliance at Theta Lake:
“Businesses should consider adopting supporting technologies to allow them to securely unlock the value of their collaboration and chat applications with all features fully enabled.
“Given that hybrid work is quicky becoming the default operational posture for organisations of all sizes, promoting the efficient and effective use of those platforms while protecting communications must be a key strategic goal.”
