Theta Lake’s free Compliant Collaboration Archive supports regulatory requirements for emergency distributed working
As the world hurtles forward with its biggest-ever experiment in forced home-based working, it’s easy to overlook the hurdles faced by the most heavily regulated sectors such as Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, and Government. Often even using the latest collaboration and communication tools is a challenge for such enterprises, and the idea of enabling colleagues to work from home in an unsupervised environment or simply using their own device is a risk too far.
Theta Lake is responding to the health crisis by making available the new archiving module, Compliant Collaboration Archive, of their flagship compliance suite completely free of charge, to help new customers get this crucial element in place fast. With the industry’s first SEC Rule 17a-4 compliant archive purpose-built for collaboration platforms, firms wanting to comply requirements from the CFTC, FCA, FINRA, IIROC, NYDFS, the SEC, and more can continue their rapid deployment of voice, video, collaboration chat, and text tools while remaining compliant with regulatory requirements for business communication preservation. Traditional archives are expensive and lack coverage for rich media while raw cloud storage isn’t purpose-built for specific regulator requirements, however, Theta Lake’s cloud-based Compliant Collaboration Archive is designed to solve this by providing collaboration retention, search, and supervision requirements across all unified communications.
We spoke to Anthony Cresci, VP Business Development and Operations at Theta Lake, to understand why this is so vital for the industries it affects.
“Regulated firms are adopting UCaaS solutions at an unprecedented rate due to COVID-19, but that doesn’t absolve them of the increasing requirements from a multitude of regulators for archiving and supervising business communications. So we’re offering the Compliant Collaboration Archive with a great amount of free storage across all media types along with key search and review options to support supervision and eDiscovery work. We want to help firms remain safe and compliant as they increasingly deploy their UCaaS platform to remote workers, such as RingCentral, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, LogMeIn, and many more.
“Right now there are a lot of companies who haven’t gone down the remote and flexible route because of the compliance challenges, now they are deploying UCaaS solutions reactively to this pandemic”
“However, firms need to consider how this impacts other groups such as compliance, risk, and legal, as well as the risk it creates for the organisation, so we’re helping address those challenges.”
With many of the major collaboration platforms making their tools available for free right now, this actually increases the danger of experimentation and shadow-IT responses from suddenly home-based workers, using their own connections and devices, to try to continue business as usual — and that often means their employers have zero visibility, supervision, or control of communications. It’s far better for the organisation to mandate a chosen multifunctional and rich collaboration tool — one with a compliant archiving tool built right into it:
“A lot of organisations who aren’t used to working with these platforms haven’t really thought through the compliance ramifications”, Cresci continues. “As regulated firms react to COVID-19 by providing UCaaS tools to employees, we are ensuring that they remain compliant with industry regulations by providing a SOC2 Type 2, WORM compliant archive to record, retain, search, and retrieve these communications. We are making it just as simple and easy to enable remote collaboration as it is for firms to remain in compliance with archiving requirements.”
Whether or not businesses get a taste for the power of the Theta Lake tools and want to engage with the premium product — complete with data loss prevention, supervision, and a full compliance workflow — one anticipated outcome of this unexpected test of work-from-home policy is that some people will surely love working this way, forcing organisations to reevaluate their strategy for remote working.
Theta Lake provides a purpose-built compliance product suite for supervision and automatic compliance risk detection across shared, shown, said, or transferred content within voice, video, collaboration chat, SMS, and other unified communications, specifically aimed at those regulated businesses who have the greatest challenge to ride the remote wave — so the future looks good for fully compliant flexibility.
This article first appeared on UC Today,
