Here’s Why Your Organization Needs to Archive Mobile (Hint: It’s Not All About Compliance)
Mobile is everywhere. It’s how we kill time waiting for the morning commute. It’s how we book our flights, order food and do business on the go. And it has quickly become an integral part of our office routine.
The use of mobile devices has dramatically affected the way we work. 88% of employees use mobile phones for work while on personal time, and almost 50% of work-related content is now accessed via a mobile device.
With numerous communication channels coming into play and boundaries between enterprise and private use of mobile getting blurrier than ever, it is becoming increasingly difficult to track and oversee business communication. Still, a large number of regulations demand that organizations retain and be able to produce messages exchanged via mobile. This makes the archiving of mobile content a new, yet essential business practice that is bound to become protocol, at least in regulated industries such as healthcare, government, finance or education.
Well, yes, some of it is about compliance…
The majority of organizations are familiar with the regulatory need to archive email communications, but a very small number are aware that they should archive other content too. Recent research shows that only 50% of work generated content is ever archived. On the other hand, all relevant standards and regulations that initially focused on email have been updated to include social media and mobile communication.
Regulations such as SOX, FINRA, SEC, GLBA, Dodd-Frank, HIPAA, HITECH, GDPR, and acts related to public records (FOIA, FRCP and FISMA) mandate the monitoring and retention of all electronic communications, including mobile messages and voicemail.
What about eDiscovery?
As enterprises grow more reliant on mobile, an increasing amount of corporate information gets exchanged on those channels. An employee might choose to communicate something via mobile precisely because it’s traditionally considered less official and formal than email. However, those conversations are still considered business records which might contain valuable, even sensitive information that can be used as evidence in breach of contract allegations, work disputes or misconduct cases.
For early insight, proper preparation and an adequate response to eDiscovery requests, it is essential that all organizations have access to their employees’ mobile exchanges. Mobile archiving allows you to capture, index, store, search, monitor and retrieve mobile (text and SMS) and voice messages in a central vault under your control. With a reliable message archiving platform, your organization will be able to place legal hold on certain data, suspend deletion and ensure everything is there when you, your lawyers or auditors need it.
The benefits only begin with retention
Organizations now utilize their archived data for a lot more than compliance and legal discovery. With the focus shifting to business improvement, increased oversight and proactive archiving, information governance and the need to protect valuable company information are currently assuming a more central role in enterprises. A good archiving solution will have sophisticated options that will allow you to analyze and draw valuable conclusions from your archived data and extract information that will benefit your entire organization. Looking at your archive as a strategic business asset rather than something that you should use only in emergency situations will give you unique insight into your organization and improve data management in all your departments.
CYOD ‒ A new trend on the horizon
An alternative to BYOD (where employees bring their personal devices to work and use them for both private and business communication), CYOD (Choose Your Own Device) is a new phenomenon which gives organizations much more control of mobile devices used by staff and facilitates the handling of enterprise information. The CYOD approach requires employees to choose from a limited range of devices (e.g. allow Apple devices but forbid Android) or limit the usage of mobile phones to work activities only. This is a factor that can influence the choice of an archiving solution, as many solutions support only particular devices, operating systems, carriers and phone ownership models.
The art of finding the right solution
If you’re already archiving email and social media content (and we truly hope you are), the best option is to integrate the mobile message archiving process into your existing solution. An obvious advantage is that users and compliance officers won’t have to get used to a new interface, but will be able to continue using the tried-and-tested solution they’re already familiar with.
When it comes to features, it’s essential that your messages are archived in a WORM format which prevents data tampering. In order to yield precise results fast, your message archiving solution should possess advanced search capabilities and a variety of search criteria. For monitoring purposes and eDiscovery, make sure there are customizable roles for level-based access and features such as audit trail, reporting and the ability to export to multiple formats.
