If you were told ten years ago (for context, Walmart was the world’s largest company at the time) you might be collaborating with your team from across the world with many remote workers at your company in ten years, you probably would have spilled your thermos you brought from home all over your wired keyboard at your cubicle desk at work.

However, here we are.

Social collaboration is a company norm regardless of worker location. Email is no longer the only way we communicate with co-workers and customers.

Platforms enabling social collaboration have been on the rise along with their resultant productivity increase. Conversely, information governance regulations are expanding to include information archiving requirements for these platforms, so the need to compliantly archive social collaboration communication efficiently and thoroughly is pivotal for regulatory compliance.

The need is there, but it begs the question, how do I meet regulatory compliance with social collaboration?

A Native View of Social Collaboration

Imagine putting dollars in your bank account, then when checking your balance, you notice your bank displays your balance in pounds. Not helpful.

To have a rich, unified experience that facilitates identification of patterns and anomalies in your data, your compliance archiving solution should display electronic communication in its near-native format. Not only does this allow you to better understand your data because you’re seeing it in a native format in context, but it also helps you remain in regulatory compliance.

This also allows you to implement visual segregation of data sources (if desired) or support the ability to search across various communication categories to interpret conversations across all captured electronic communications categories.

Regulatory agencies’ goals lie in maintaining market and business integrity. By presenting your social collaboration communication in its native view, you’re helping to facilitate integrity at your organization.

Broad Coverage

Not only should regulatory compliance be a top concern for your company, but your own application and data security should be a priority, too.

Incorporating a dynamic security scanning program that includes tests for known risks that are automated and incorporated into the inspection tools help facilitate a deeper security coverage. Integrity of your solution should also be a priority for the vendor.

As part of a commitment to security, you can engage a third party to audit the data centers where your information is held, operational policies and procedures, and the security of your business environment. The results of the audit can be used to fix issues regarding regulatory compliance and reduce overall business risk.

Identity Management

Identity management systems are on the rise as compliance regulations tighten. These systems help with the strategic purpose of regulatory compliance but carrying them out usually involves a focus on business agility, cost reduction, and overall efficiency, while compliance is viewed as a secondary perk.

Identity matters in a broad context and can’t be thought of in silos to be most effective.

Implementation of a compliance archive solution can help provide your organization with access governance, meaning everyone can be assigned access to data based on their role and identity and you can monitor and report on policy compliance, keeping actions outside of compliance at bay.

Being able to detect in real time anything occurring outside of regulations or company policy can be a safeguard against litigation or violations of regulatory compliance. Automation of compliance combined with enforcement puts the data in the hands of those who need it when they need it.

Cross-Channel Contextual Search

Just as one would not enter choppy lake waters without a boat or flotation device, IT leaders should not attempt to glean insights from a disparate data lake without a complete compliance archiving solution, especially not one without the ability to perform cross-channel contextual searches.

With a compliance archive that supports any form of electronic communication, you can use contextual search capabilities to search across diverse electronic message types. By combining your company’s communications into a unified compliance data lake, you can enable authorized users to investigate the message content that is most relevant and focus on the content of the communications without regard to their origin.

When coupled with data enrichment, a compliance archive can allow you to use a single search query to return results, saving you time and increasing your efficiency.

Pull messaging from multiple sources to tell a cohesive story of how employees communicate with each other and with customers. Not only can this help you understand communication occurring within or outside the business, it also is a proactive step in maintaining regulatory compliance.

Robust Alerting

Implementing a compliance archive is a good first step toward maintaining regulatory compliance. However, if there is a problem in the system or data and you don’t know about it, the entire point of the archive has been defeated. Let your compliance archive be just that: a system that helps you stay compliant by alerting you when risks or problems arise.

Continuous application monitoring delivers visibility and insight into production application risk. It combines application discovery with dynamic vulnerability scanning, risk profiling, and runtime protection.  Dynamic scanning searches for new vulnerabilities, risk profile changes and insecure deployments. Runtime detection monitors for exploit attempts, suspicious user behavior, and inappropriate data extraction.

Configurable alert settings enable automated email notifications based on content in your social media records, including specific keywords, questions, and personally identifiable information (PII), such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, and other generic identification numbers.

Your compliance archive should be working for you, not the other way around.

Managed Services

A compliance archive is like a well-oiled machine and without proper maintenance, can eventually become unhelpful and eat your money. And since your business is unique, the operational functionality of your solution will be unique.

To combat this, a compliance archive coupled with a managed service team can alleviate the headaches of integration and maintenance, saving you time and money in the long run. By utilizing a managed service, you an employ a global team of consultants with the expertise and experience necessary to ensure the best solution for your unique environment.

Having a direct link to the engineering and product development that created the archive in the first place can allow you to rely on experience gained through hundreds of engagements. A managed services team can bring best-practice design, planning, and deployment experience to every implementation.

Where to Start?

Your company is important, so you don’t want just any compliance archive built in a sweaty garage.

With over 40,000 customers, including 98 companies listed in the Fortune 100, Micro Focus has vast experience in compliance archiving.

Micro Focus has the custom solutions, experience, and people to enable you to archive all types of social collaboration content while adhering to regulatory compliance.

Download our ebook, Making the Move to Next-Generation Information Archiving, to help in your decision.

View more information on Micro Focus’ extensive compliance and information archiving solutions.

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The Micro Focus IM&G team

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