UCToday: Compliance and Continuity Despite Coronavirus

Despite the recent growth of the UC sector, whole industries have typically avoided cloud-based working due to the lack of compliance, security, safety, and supervision controls for UC and collaboration platforms – at least until very recently. All of a sudden everything has changed, and around the world businesses are faced with a stark choice: adapt to home-based working overnight, or simply cease to operate.

That’s why Theta Lake are making their flagship Compliance Suite available to all customers of Cisco Webex, RingCentral, and Zoom, free of charge for the next three months — to help businesses maintain continuity and compliance, despite enforced homeworking.

We spoke to Anthony Cresci, VP Business Development and Operations at Theta Lake, to understand the challenge organisations were up against and the difference this integration is going to make to regulated and risk-averse organisations:

“Financial Institutions, in particular, weren’t set up for remote working. Overnight they needed to figure out a way to keep the organisation going, keep employees productive while adhering to their own policies for strictly capturing, monitoring, and supervising what FINRA now calls digital communications. This typically meant deploying remote collaboration platforms as quickly as possible, getting them in place, then figuring out the rest of it later.”

“Now there’s the challenge that these types of communications that had been taking place on the corporate network had compliance and supervision controls. Suddenly compliance, risk, and legal teams no longer have visibility into these communications”

New industries moving online

As Cresci reminded us, it’s not just financial industries that need this degree of communications oversight. With the more complete move to collaboration for almost every industry and segment, Theta Lake is seeing use cases across privacy, acceptable use, and compliance abound, eager to benefit from secure ways of collaborating online.

“The health, pharma, education, and government are just some of the places we are seeing the rapid migration to full collaboration tools create massive disruption for risk and compliance. Suddenly, the doctors, patients, pharmacists, teachers, students, administrators, and more are fully sharing files, screens, images, videos, and more. That creates a whole slew of data leakage, privacy violations, abusive behaviour risks, data theft, and related risks.”

Using collaboration features such as screen sharing, in-app whiteboarding, chat, and even the camera are all efficient and effective ways to share information with peers, partners, prospects, patients, students, and customers. What happens when the screen shared has account numbers or product plans? What happens when the chat message says ‘I’ll share that information with you offline from my private email? What happens when there is abusive behaviour on full display? What happens when a sensitive document is shown on a camera? The answer is downstream violations, liabilities, and lawsuits from unmonitored and unaddressed risk. Risk and compliance teams shouldn’t be blind to this risk, and organisations should be able to embrace the full capabilities of collaboration with a plan, program, and technology to tackle the bad with the overwhelming good.

Indeed, however long it takes and to what extent these individual and group conversations return at any point to ‘normal’ in the future, it seems highly likely that the use of video and chat collaboration will remain as a key component to drive productivity and cost-effectiveness in the next chapter of how our day-to-day work communication takes place.

Rapid and easy deployment

Theta Lake’s cloud-based platform is easily configured, allowing firms to deploy compliance, security, archiving, safety, and supervision controls within a day. In addition, the native integration to collaboration platforms allows organisations to roll out these controls alongside their deployment of collaboration tools, helping Risk and Compliance Officers sleep better at night knowing that compliance is scaling with business communications. The ability to detect if Personally Identifiable Information (PII) was shared, if there is liability from sharing risky images, if profanity is creating a hostile environment in meetings, and the ability to detect regulatory risks from suitability to promissory statements are just some of the risk and compliance detection Theta Lake offers security and compliance professionals alike.

That provision of compliant archiving, deep supervision, data leakage, and risk detection across what was said, shown, or shared in leading collaboration platforms permits the alignment of their safety, risk, and compliance requirements while empowering their workforce to collaborate remotely from anywhere.

And for newly-home-based teams who must meet financial services requirements for retention and supervision of communications under SEC, FINRA, CFTC, and MiFID II rules – or any business operating under acceptable use standards and PII regarding HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR – or other state regulatory requirements, compliance is now one less thing to worry about.

Theta Lake could make the difference for how we make these conversations safe, now and in the future.