How to Gain the Most Value from Your Compliance Processes

Regulators increasingly require companies to capture, store, and audit more of their digital paper trails. However, the importance of compliance and the growing obligation for business doesn't have to result in an insurmountable challenge for companies today.

Ongoing developments in technology continue to make compliance much easier to achieve. With automatic updating, for example, compliance officers define which types of communications need to be archived for regulatory, legal, or strategic reasons. Filters then comb through inbound/outbound communication across channels and appropriately flag and archive anything deemed relevant. In fact, the whole process is as thorough as it is effortless.

Cloud-based technologies can make compliance easier as well. Because the cloud is scalable and flexible by nature, any technology based in the cloud can adapt as soon as regulations change. The very nature of cloud technology enables companies that are trying to keep pace with regulations instead of always trying to catch up.

Ultimately, technology must be utilized to make compliance easy, so much so that it stops being an obstacle and starts being an asset.

Archiving for Understanding

Imagine having an archive of all your business communications from a dozen or more channels: email, chat, text messages, social media, etc. Now imagine that each communication is saved in a common file format and searchable through a simple “Google-like” portal. With such capabilities, past challenges in archiving and compliance search are quickly becoming invaluable tool sets.

“Single-pane” archives are also invaluable for compliance purposes, especially during auditing. But the same approach can be just as valuable to employees and executives who need answers and insights. Today’s communications tend to sprawl across channels — starting with email, continuing through texts, and concluding with a video conference. Tracking everything included in that conversation is almost impossible unless all the components have been archived together. From another perspective, trying to find every mention of “client X” is difficult when you’re only searching through email.

Archiving integrates information to create a consolidated master source of information. Exact information is easy to find and just as easy to trust, which is important for compliance (and even more so for performance).

Compliance on Autopilot

Once a best-in-class archive has been implemented, compliance stops requiring active management. Instead of requiring daily management, companies can simply update their archive occasionally and still benefit from better compliance overall. A few of the realized efficiencies are as follows:
 

• An end to regulatory penalties: Noncompliance can lead to fines, fees, bad public relations, legal challenges, and lots of other expensive setbacks. Once compliance becomes consistent, unforeseen compliance costs don’t have to hurt budgets or the bottom line.
• Easy access to required data: Tracking down a specific piece of information can take a lot of time and effort (when it’s possible at all). Archives with unified search eliminate the frustrating needle-in-the-haystack scenarios and give businesses the capability to quickly find exactly what regulators want.
• Answers for every conceivable question: Compliant archives are also goldmines of information about an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. After compliance becomes less of a concern, companies can begin exploring the data they have for ideas, innovations, and insights that would be impossible to find otherwise.

The quality of the archive is what really matters. The archive needs to be automatic, up-to-date, integrated, and accessible — not merely an information dump.

ZixArchive: Empowerment Through Information

ZixArchive has distinguished itself as an industry-leading solution for compliance and performance management. It’s cloud-based so that it can accommodate data from as many communication channels as possible. Even the most sensitive data is safe in the cloud because it’s protected by world-class cyber defenses. Plus, cloud deployments take minimal time, meaning you can begin building your ZixArchive almost immediately.

Unlike some more limited options, ZixArchive can accommodate more than 50 different communication types including text, video, and audio. And thanks to unified search capabilities, all 50-plus channels can be explored from a consolidated interface. In that way, ZixArchive provides unparalleled oversight into the character of a company — highlighting what is working and what is not — pushing consistent compliance into much more of a fringe benefit rather than a liability.