While many businesses were hesitant about adopting an enterprise messaging solution, the pandemic has pushed their employees to use consumer-grade messaging apps that can jeopardize the company information – thereby making secure enterprise messaging platforms a key for enabling employees to use secure instant messaging as a way to communicate.
While many businesses were hesitant about adopting an enterprise messaging solution, the pandemic has pushed their employees to use consumer-grade messaging apps that can jeopardize the company information – thereby making secure enterprise messaging platforms a key for enabling employees to use secure instant messaging as a way to communicate.
The growing importance of mobile communication for enterprises
From faster communication to increased collaboration with colleagues and enhanced responsiveness, using mobile messaging as a mode of communication has many benefits for businesses. However, it can be inundating for businesses to track multiple channels and networks for archiving text messages and calls.
More than 80% of the world’s workforce is mobile. With consumer demands changing at warp speed, most frontline employers are trying to allow employees access to every possible channel on mobile devices to be responsive. Many businesses are already realizing the benefit of allowing employees to use mobile communications amidst uncertain hybrid post-COVID-19 working arrangements.
With the global mobile workforce predicted to increase to 1.88 billion by 2023, the real problem is in ensuring secure mobile messaging that includes text message monitoring and archival. In the United States, people spend around 5.4 hours a day on mobile devices. This trend will only keep growing as employees increasingly work remotely.
Why archive text messages from mobile devices?
The risks of not archiving text messages from mobile devices are many, including:
- Cyber attacks that lead to leakage of sensitive data
- When mobile communication tools are used by employees without policy controls, compliance gaps increase if text messages and voice call content is not archived or monitored
- Mobile communications across multiple channels increase the risk of intellectual property loss and legal litigations.
Regulatory bodies and policymakers, including SOX, HIPAA, HITECH, FINRA, and public records acts such as FOIA and FRCP impose mandates on businesses to monitor and archive mobile communications. With the need to archive text messages from Android or iOS devices, businesses must use a secure mobile messaging platform—that also categorizes the archived content according to regulatory priorities—to ensure mobile compliance.
End-user self-service for secure enterprise messaging
In order to archive in real-time, a business must use a secure instant messaging platform where employees can collaborate from remote locations. Therefore, built-in archiving and high level of automation can simplify the self-service archiving and monitoring needs of enterprises.
Easy and flexible eDiscovery
Businesses must be able to use search features that allow them to quickly find specific mobile communications from across hundreds of thousands of records. This should also directly enable text message monitoring. Consequently, flexible eDiscovery features empower businesses to proactively respond to regulatory investigations and scheduled audits.
Best approach for regulated firms to allow mobile messaging
Any mobile archiving solution must help businesses comply with recordkeeping principles for regulated firms. By using an advanced mobile archiving tool, regulated firms improve litigation preparedness by enhancing eDiscovery of archived mobile communications and simplifying text message monitoring.
Mobile archiving to reduce compliance risks
Mobile archiving solutions serve businesses well where mobile communications by employees and the respective conduct are rigorously regulated, particularly in industries such as banking, financial services, insurance, healthcare, education, and government agencies.
In essence, mobile archiving tools help these regulated firms to collect, secure, and monitor mobile communications taking place on an enterprise messaging platform. Therefore, mobile archiving directly helps businesses to comply with regulations while preventing spoliation, loss of data, and punitive monetary fines.
Importance of a Unified Archiving System
In our experience working with regulated firms to help them confidently allow their employees to use mobile communications, we have learnt that a really secure enterprise messaging solution is one that maintains a unified archiving system in the back end. The primary importance of a unified archiving system is to avoid information siloes that can result in duplication of mobile communications, thereby making it difficult for eDiscovery.
Another reason why a unified archiving system is important for any enterprise messaging solution is because it provides the ability to adequately search all the relevant mobile communications from a centralized repository for regulatory audits.
The requirement of archiving text messages and phone calls can result in fines imposed by mobile regulatory compliance bodies. For example, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) imposed a monetary penalty of HK$2.1m against a British multinational investment bank and financial services holding company for failing to adhere to the mobile archiving requirements at its private banking division.
However, business losses arising from the failure to archive text messages are not only limited to regulatory fines. They extend also to prolonged legal litigations, reputation damage, and broken investor relations.
The best mobile archiving and enterprise messaging solution
Whichever solution is chosen, businesses must be mindful of their requirements while assessing and selecting mobile archiving and enterprise messaging tools. The primary criteria for the selection of such solutions must involve regulatory and compliance requirements, industry viability, security of the platform, and scalability and flexibility. Such traits make a huge difference for regulated firms aspiring to adopt mobile archiving tools and enterprise messaging solutions. Ultimately, the most important thing is to gauge the consistency of the tool.
About TeleMessage
TeleMessage captures and retains mobile content, including mobile SMS messages, voice calls, and WhatsApp, and WeChat conversations from corporate or BYOD mobile phones to ensure compliance with various data protection regulations. The messages are securely and reliably retained within TeleMessage servers or forwarded to your choice of archiving data storage vendor.
Our mobile archiving products securely record content from mobile carriers and mobile devices for various ownership models (BYOD, CYOD, and employer-issued). With our multiple archiving solutions, you can always find the right tools or blend for your requirements:
- Network Archiver
- Enterprise Number Archiver
- Android Archiver
- WhatsApp Archiver
- WeChat Archiver
- Signal Archiver
- Telegram Archiver
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text & calls archiving for corporate and BYOD phones. Visit our website at www.telemessage.com to learn more about our mobile archiving products.
