6 Key Archive Features for Compliant Communications

With the right archive capabilities, businesses can support their communications channels of choice while complying with industry regulations. We look at six essential capabilities.

Enterprise users generate a massive amount of data every day in various forms, and social communications adds further to this growing pile of communications data. Given the ever-growing data sources that should be archived, governed and made discoverable, archive platforms have to keep up with the exponential growth of data. Enterprise cloud archives must be designed to handle the ingestion of both real-time data and historical data from an existing messaging source or an archive. This requires dynamic scaling to handle the increase in data volume and variety.

When an archive swells, search performance can suffer because the underlying search technology is unable to process vast data stores efficiently. When faced with litigation, time is of the utmost importance. Searching archives for e-discovery purposes should deliver consistency and fidelity every time. On-premises and first-generation email archiving solutions aren’t capable of ingesting, searching and exporting content fast enough.

First-generation archive systems take social media posts, instant messages and unified communications data and turn them into individual, disjointed “messages” in email form. This requires a significant amount of manual time and effort to piece together conversation threads that often occur over multiple channels. Maintaining the unique properties of each channel within conversational threads not only improves review efficiency, but also provides insights into patterns across those channels. Smart archives will save the entire thread for an accurate, chronological representation of the conversation, even if a portion of the conversation has been edited or deleted.

Archive systems must deliver security and data protection without compromise to meet the highest standards for regulatory compliance and e-discovery. Ensuring the encryption of communications in motion and at rest and having security controls and key management processes in place guarantees that the controls are monitored regularly. It delivers a new level of security and compliance while freeing IT from the substantial costs and resources issues associated with traditional archives.

Open APIs facilitate the ingestion of data from custom applications or third-party sources, so businesses have a single repository to conduct more efficient e-discovery. With this flexibility, businesses can insert, search, access and export additional communications and transactional content for advanced capabilities, such as data visualization and analytics.

Companies need to ensure that their archive system aligns with their IT system and supports the deployment option of choice, whether it’s a full multi-tenant cloud, dedicated private cloud or on-premises implementation.