The challenge with legacy compliance archiving
A massive amount of data is generated across the modern communication ecosystem (chat, voice, whiteboards, SMS, AI-generated interactions, reactions, GIFs, etc.). With firms increasingly dependent on UCC platforms and their AI-powered communications (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, and Webex, etc.) regulators are raising expectations around communications recordkeeping and oversight.
In the latest Theta Lake survey:
- 99% of firms plan to expand AI use
- 76% anticipate increased and deeper usage of communication and collaboration tools and features over the next 12 months
- 92% of firms are struggling to capture business communications to meet their recordkeeping and supervisory obligations, or are forced to disable the capabilities due to compliance concerns
- 62% of Firms Struggle to Reconstruct Communications for E-Discovery
- 67% of firms reported it likely their staff are still using unmonitored channels
A shift to Digital Communications Governance and Archiving driven by data complexity
Legacy solutions created for email in the past cannot keep pace with today’s unified, multi-modal communications. Legacy archives struggle with communications data related to:
- AI-generated messages
- Real-time collaboration
- Multi-modal conversations happening across channels
This creates a major data integrity issue for compliance, IT, and legal teams who must protect their firms from regulatory, operational, and reputational risk.
As digital communications evolve, so do compliance standards. This is why Gartner now classifies the space as Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA) – a category centered on governance, completeness, accuracy, and defensible recordkeeping across all communication formats.
Why unified capture matters more than ever
Complete, unified capture is the foundation of modern DCGA programs. It ensures consistent, complete, multi-modal data ingestion across every communication channel and user, eliminating the fragmentation of point solutions or archive add-ons.
Theta Lake Unified Capture Enables:
- Comprehensive, multi-modal capture (eComms, aComms, vComms, aiComms)
- In-sync delivery with no message loss, lag, or partial capture
- Certified integrations that deliver vendor-approved, complete, and reliable data
- Full UC enablement, reducing off-channel behavior
- Improved productivity by allowing employees to use UC features fully and safely
When firms rely on email-era technology, they miss critical pieces of communication. When they rely on unified capture, they gain a complete, defensible dataset that not only satisfies recordkeeping demands, but improves the efficiency and accuracy of downstream use cases such as eDiscovery and Supervision.
Why reconciliation is now a core regulatory expectation
Capturing data is required and proving completeness is non-negotiable. Regulators expect validation that:
- Every required record exists
- Nothing is missing or partial
- All captured data is accurate and available
- Downstream systems operate on reliable inputs (surveillance, supervision, eDiscovery, reporting)
Reconciliation has become the control that regulators ask about first. It underpins:
- Regulatory reporting accuracy
- Search quality
- Supervision & surveillance completeness
- eDiscovery defensibility
- Observability optimization
Incomplete or mismatched records don’t just create gaps. They undermine the entire compliance program.
Firms cannot govern what they cannot capture, and they cannot defend what they cannot reconcile
To solve the DCGA data problem, firms need a modern, integrated approach. These pillars directly solve the shift to DCGA by eliminating gaps, inconsistencies, and unreliable data:
- More coverage across UCC tools & modalities
- Theta Lake directly captures chat, voice, video, whiteboards, visual data, emojis, reactions, GIFs, AI-generated content, and more, ensuring completeness across all formats.
- Certified and maintained integrations and content recorders
- Better reconciliation, reporting & evidence
Reconciliation is essential to proving capture accuracy. Theta Lake delivers:
- Real-time graphs showing records vs. captured records validation
- One-click reconciliation reports
- Reconciliation via API
- Repeatable, scalable, standardized integrations
Theta Lake’s architecture allows:
- Certified integrations UC platforms
- Seamless routing to archives, cloud storage, or data lakes, with visual diagrams of data destinations
- Standardized APIs for ingestion, validation, and extraction
- Easier Setup and maintenance
Channel integrations use a consistent, simple four-step setup. This saves IT and compliance teams time while ensuring predictable results.
A closer look: Theta Lake’s reconciliation
Theta Lake provides three layers of upstream and downstream reconciliation built directly into its Unified Capture platform:
1: Real-time visuals
- Graphs of records vs. captured records
- Anomaly detection
- Ingestion health checks
2: Reconciliation Reports
- One-click reports directly from the dashboard
- Exportable proof for internal/external audits
3: API
- Integrates directly with the source UCC platform
- Forensic-level validation
- Integration with SIEMs and data lakes
- Support for custom-built compliance tooling
The reconciliation API also supports reconciliation by integration ID, enabling segmentation by divisions within each integration for more targeted recordkeeping. These capabilities ensure firms can trust that every communication record is present, accurate, and complete, without extensive manual effort or costly managed services.
The downstream impact: better data leads to better compliance
Fixing the data problem doesn’t just meet recordkeeping expectations, it improves everything that depends on data.
Unified capture + reconciliation improve:
- Supervision & surveillance quality to dramatically reduce false positives and produce better analysis
- Search accuracy and eDiscovery completeness
- Reporting reliability and audit readiness
When data is consistent, it can be leveraged to improve every downstream workflow: faster, more accurate, and more defensible.
Conclusion: the future of compliance requires complete, unified capture & deep reconciliation
The industry is solving the problems from the email era every day. To meet evolving regulatory expectations, compliance programs must modernize their foundation. They can do this seamlessly in a phased approach that doesn’t drain resources.
Unified capture ensures complete coverage.
Reconciliation provides proof.
Together, they deliver the compliance confidence regulators expect.
Read more
- The Data Problem with Compliance Archiving
- AI Communications Are a Compliance Risk You Can’t Ignore
- The Essential Requirements of a Certified Microsoft Teams Recorder
- Best Practices for Electronic Communications in Microsoft Teams
