Digital tools fuel hybrid work but also create difficult-to-solve compliance challenges.
I’ve talked to enough companies now to know that hybrid will be the most common work model moving forward. My research shows that 75% of users will continue to work from home at least one day a week, emphasizing digital tools, such as unified communications and collaboration (UCaaS) tools.
While this creates a more productive workforce, it creates havoc for the compliance officers as it’s difficult to understand who is saying what to whom with what intent over what channel. Workers could accidentally be showing NDA documents, promising things they should not or doing other tasks that create compliance risk.
Theta Lake Simplifies Digital Collaboration Compliance
Theta Lake is a vendor that builds compliance solutions for organizations using communications and collaboration platforms. Founded in 2017, the company supports a wide range of platforms and has more than 100 integrations. It has forged strong relationships with industry leaders like Zoom, Webex, RingCentral, Teams, and Slack.
Theta Lake recently partnered with Mural to help organizations securely capture whiteboard content, including text and rich media. Whiteboards are a rapidly growing segment in unified communications. However, regulators distrust this emerging technology as there were no previous solutions supporting dynamic visual communications and whiteboards. Theta Lake is addressing this skepticism by enabling organizations in heavily regulated industries to create whiteboard content while remaining compliant.
I recently chatted with Garth Landers, Theta Lake’s director of global product marketing, about the Mural partnership and how the company is tackling issues surrounding unified communications, compliance, and security. Highlights of the ZKast interview, done in conjunction with eWEEK eSPEAKS, are below:
- With rapid adoption of UCaaS tools during the pandemic, compliance and security became secondary to productivity and collaboration. The traditional compliance infrastructure, which focused on monitoring and capturing email and chat data, now faces new challenges with the emergence of virtual platforms. Large organizations are using multiple platforms, making it difficult for internal compliance teams to monitor and manage them.
- For regulated industries, the cost of non-compliance can be tremendous. According to a 2023 ZK Research report, the average cost of compliance is around $5.5 mil., while the cost of noncompliance is significantly higher at $14.8 mil.
- In addition to the financial implications, there are various consequences organizations face when dealing with compliance issues. Worst-case scenarios include fines, sanctions, and a negative impact on the brand due to non-compliance. On the other hand, restricting access to certain functionalities within an app to remain in compliance can result in lost productivity.
- Theta Lake tackles compliance and security with software that’s completely transparent to the user. It seamlessly integrates with communications and collaboration platforms to capture data in its native format, preserving context. The information is then routed downstream to compliance teams and archived without impacting the end user’s experience.
- From an administrative standpoint, Theta Lake’s software is easy to deploy, taking hours or days rather than weeks or months. The software also includes risk-based detections that utilize artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP). With more than 85 out-of-the-box detections, it requires minimal configuration.
- RingCentral is another significant partner and investor in Theta Lake. Theta Lake has several integrations within RingCentral, including RingCentral SMS as a secure alternative for mobile messaging, virtual meetings, voice, and most recently, contact center support. The contact center integration provides organizations with key features like screen recordings, risk detection, data loss protection, and electronic discovery.
- The contact center is an emerging growth market for RingCentral and unified communications in general. There is a need for contact center tools that can effectively manage operations. Theta Lake addresses this need by enabling compliance teams to capture and manage all interactions in a unified manner, whether they are working with a single or multiple platforms.
