Three Key Compliance Challenges of Increasing Digital Collaboration

The remote workforce explosion this year set off an exponential volume of content and digital communications. Businesses seeking to manage and maintain compliance across all those communications are struggling to keep up.

In this blog post, we explore the three key security and compliance challenges triggered by the growing demands of digital communication. And offer resources for how you can meet those challenges in stride.

1. Capturing data across all channels

In October 2020, daily active users on Microsoft Teams skyrocketed to 115 million. Slack added 7,000 customers in the first seven weeks of the pandemic lockdown in the US. Exponential reliance on digital collaboration tools like these platforms adds tremendous complexity to compliance to retain, supervise and review content to ensure regulatory requirements are met.

Key elements of a solution that can tackle these complexities include:

• The right connector capturing content across all communication channels
• Downstream systems receiving content accurately
• Efficient access to content for reviewers and supervisors

2. Social media exposure

Just as many business employees have gone all-digital so too are business customers. To succeed in an increasingly digital marketplace, businesses must meet their customers where they are spending much of their digital time: social media. But in some industries, social media activity is heavily regulated. Organizations are caught between marketing demands and compliance requirements. As your company scales, it must ensure that it can apply policies that align with regulations like FINRA, FDA, HIPAA, FCA, FTC, SEC, GDPR and more.

3. Verifying the paper trail for compliance and retention

While an organization might build an airtight process, enforcing that process is just as—if not more—important. Having quick access to a paper trail is essential in the event of an audit or investigation. But building that ability into a compliance program is not easy. Even if the software and platforms function well, ongoing monitoring for gaps and service disruptions is essential. Many companies just aren’t set up for that kind of scrutiny.

Before you begin tackling these three challenges it’s important to do some discovery work. Key areas to explore are:

• How do your people communicate? what platforms are employees using to get work done? Consider channels that have been officially adopted such as Zoom and Slack as well as unofficial channels such as OneDrive.
• How well-equipped are you to handle new types of content? Employees aren’t just exchanging text—they are exchanging videos and graphics too.
• How is content packaged and processed? Gaps and inconsistencies in how content is captured could create problems.

To learn more about implementing effective and efficient archiving and compliance strategy at your company, get our latest e-book.