For countless companies, Microsoft’s broad ecosystem of communication, collaboration, and productivity tools has become essential to the modern workplace. With endless features to improve communications, knowledge sharing, and even innovation, Microsoft is helping organizations build the perfect “productivity suite” for modern teams.
But as workplaces evolve, with new communication channels, storage systems, and the advent of generative AI, there’s a crucial challenge to overcome. Maintaining compliance. Theta Lake, experts in compliance, privacy, and security optimization, offers its customers intuitive ways to preserve compliance without compromising the flexibility of its Microsoft ecosystem.
We spoke to Devin Redmond (CEO of Theta Lake), Kirk Koenigsbauer (COO of experiences and devices at Microsoft), and Leo Brito (EVP at Wells Fargo) to access their insights into maintaining compliance in the Microsoft 365 landscape.
Navigating the Complexities of Communications Compliance
Microsoft implements various strategies to ensure its platform is secure, extensible, and reliable for multiple institutions, from implementing audit frameworks to offering a comprehensive compliance program for Microsoft Cloud. However, for highly regulated industries, like the financial sector, additional elements may be necessary to ensure the right level of data control.
Companies in financial industries, like many others, are going through a massive period of change, driven by changing communication methods and evolving collaborative workflows. While Microsoft tools can help streamline this transformation, every change requires a careful consideration of the impact it may have on compliance.
Companies need to ensure they’re collecting the correct information from every channel, storing it securely, and ensuring the right insights are available to auditors. Theta Lake works with Microsoft clients on three levels to ensure success:
- Platform enablement: Financial services organizations often disable key features across Teams and other collaboration tools until they can ensure capture for compliance record keeping. Theta Lake focuses on delivering a Unified Capture layer that can enable all features and modalities of communication and collaboration in the M365 suite and beyond. That includes options to deliver capture comms with metadata to pre-existing email archives or voice recording tools, delivering to Purview archiving, or delivering metadata to Azure Data Storage Blobs directly. This ensures Microsoft customers to use all the latest M365 features with compliance capture and record reconciliation in place.
- Augmentation: Next, by enabling the richest set of communication and collaboration features in M365, Theta Lake can augment compliance for the comprehensive needs of financial services teams. They can implement Purview integrations that allow the tracking of regulatory records across all communications inside and outside of the M365 suite or the ability to use Theta Lake’s Unified Search. Unified Search visually shows communication journeys across voice, chat, email, video, and file sharing across the M365 suite and 3rd party UC tools.
- Collaboration: Enablement, augmentation, and practical customer success comes with the close working relationship Theta Lake has with Microsoft. With weekly product management and engineering calls, Microsoft-certified integrations, and official partnerships in multiple areas, Theta Lake and Microsoft tightly collaborate to identify and address on the needs of financial services customers. That highly interactive partnership engagement has delivered value around Unified Capture, Unified Search, and unique features for Proactive Compliance to drive remediation, redaction, and use of automated custom group-based meeting and chat disclaimers.
Looking to the Future with Microsoft and Compliance
Already, the massive shift in the communication landscape has introduced various challenges for businesses to overcome when navigating compliance. However, as Microsoft continues to transform its ecosystem with new innovations like Copilot (the generative AI assistant), there will be new considerations to address.
According to Theta Lake, tools like these will become integral to the workplace, but like any new resource, they need to be implemented correctly. If companies can think carefully about where they need to inject levels of compliance, such as tracking prompts to see what people are asking and using disclaimers effectively, they can leverage AI with minimal risk.
