Microsoft 365 is the world’s most popular cloud service, granting firms access to Office applications, email, calendar, file storage and sharing, and allowing businesses to seamlessly work and communicate both internally and externally. Additionally, as part of the Microsoft 365 offering, each company can access the Microsoft security and compliance center.
Microsoft 365 Compliance
With Microsoft compliance, each organization can adhere to the standards and regulations that are contextually relevant.
The compliance center offers different capabilities depending on the license level subscription.
But even with the basic license, Microsoft offers compliance and risk management capabilities through its Microsoft 365 E3/E5 solutions to help organizations assess risks, govern, and protect sensitive data.
Moreover, TeleMessage can offer firms the ability to archive employee mobile communication in Microsoft 365 and provide compliance over a variety of mobile channels.
Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance and Information Governance
Microsoft offers several powerful tools for firms with greater compliance requirements, among them dozens of connectors to archive third-party data in Microsoft 365, allowing seamless ingestion of data from various sources.
Data flowing from the connectors can be delivered to the inbox of the employee, as well as to the compliance teams that can enforce: Litigation hold, eDiscovery, retention settings, records management, and setup automated communication compliance that will flag problematic content for review.
You can find the TeleMessage connectors for Microsoft 365 here
Firms that require streamlined archiving of mobile communication, or want to store all their employee communication in Microsoft 365 can choose from among the different options and capabilities they gain with different Microsoft licenses, such as:
- Microsoft 365 E3
- Microsoft 365 E5 Communication Compliance
- Or the full Microsoft 365 E5 licenses
The connectors can also be used with the Microsoft Business Premium licenses.
If you are expanding the Microsoft 365 E3 to E5 compliance solutions, consider expanding your coverage from email to full mobile compliance, with the litigation, eDiscovery and many other features with the full Microsoft E5 suite.
The need for archiving to ensure mobile compliance
When it comes to risk management of data created within the company, especially when Microsoft 365 is used for the email exchange, it’s worth considering the expansion to mobile communication with the Microsoft 365 E5 or Communication compliance, which offers several advantages:
- Helping businesses discover and secure sensitive data from across multiple locations
- Empowering risk management teams to identify high priority risks and remediate those risks
- Allowing businesses to proactively investigate for relevant data to support legal requirements
Ultimately, the solution helps businesses adopt a risk-based approach to ensuring compliance.
Microsoft 365 compliance solutions help in securing sensitive data, and with TeleMessage mobile archiving connectors it allow businesses to connect multiple mobile communication platforms and mobile text and calls from corporate and private devices of employees. In fact, risk and compliance teams can have a centralized location for all archived communications exclusively powered in Microsoft 365 compliance solution.
Archiving with Microsoft E3/E5 solutions
Common to all versions of Microsoft 365, the Microsoft E3 and E5 compliance solutions assist organizations in sensitive data discovery, archiving, and regulatory and compliance activities while simplifying IT infrastructure operations. Both E3 and E5 solutions offer robust security and reliability.
Protect and govern sensitive data
Modern businesses collect vast amounts of data from a variety of sources that include sensitive data, particularly in the banking, finance, payments, retail, ecommerce and healthcare sectors. Therefore, data discovery, continuous auditing, and sensitive data governance are key activities of any security and compliance solution for sensitive data created by an organization. To handle these responsibilities and processes in an efficient manner, many large organizations prefer to use Microsoft 365 along with an E5 solution, which supports a risk based compliance approach, allowing risk and compliance teams to gauge critical risks and remediate proactively to attain compliance.
Extending the Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 risk-based compliance to mobile communication requires businesses to include archiving solutions. Given the dynamic nature and granularity of sensitive data, businesses must also be capable of recording mobile text and instant messages for comprehensive data search and retrieval.
How to manage mobile communication archiving
With ever-growing communication and a continued increased in collaboration between colleagues, the role of mobile messaging will only increase. The global mobile workforce is predicted to increase to 1.88 billion employees by 2023. Archiving the inevitable resulting growth of mobile communications, in formats like SMS text messages, represent a key step for businesses to ensure mobile compliance, with failure resulting in punitive monetary sanctions.
Whether the need is for archiving plain text messages, archive calls, or capture text messages directly from mobile carriers, or from Android or iOS devices, you can find a one-stop shop with TeleMessage’s connectors for Microsoft 365.
In case you’re looking to archive mobile instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram or Signal – Microsoft compliance can be an important step for businesses looking to strengthen their security posture and comply with regulatory standards. Mobile archiving solutions help businesses prevent loss of sensitive data and keep the information organized for regulatory enquiries.
Simply put, archiving is the process of securely storing information, which acts as witness to the past in helping businesses discover, store, and organize data based on compliance requirements. In highly regulated industries, businesses use mobile communication archiving solutions as a way to provide evidence and justifications for their actions to regulators. And having it all centered in Microsoft 365, might be an easy path for firms already utilizing Microsoft or Azure.
Comparing E3, E5 and E5 Communication compliance
Archiving employee mobile communication data into mailboxes is a first step in preserving the content for legal, administrative reasons.
However, there are multiple other compliance risks that organizations are vulnerable to be exposed to, especially in the evolving hybrid model of work.
The Microsoft E5 license enables customers to leverage the entire Microsoft compliance suite on first party and third-party data together, thus bringing down total cost of ownership, as well as ensuring ease of maintenance as everything is under a consolidated umbrella (rather than having fragmented vendors to manage compliances on different types of data sources).
The table below
| Feature/Capability | Microsoft License level | ||
| Solution
| What is the significance of the solution? | Microsoft E3 Features | Microsoft Communication Compliance or full Microsoft E5 Features |
| Compliance connectors | Allow ingestion of external sources | — Not available — | Full Communication Compliance suite |
| How to archive Mobile Communication | TeleMessage mobile communication be archived | Yes – Can ingest mobile communication as regular emails to a dedicated compliance mailbox, to employee mailbox or both | Yes – Use dedicated readymade connectors that will flow into employee mailboxes and into all the Microsoft compliance advanced tools (see below) |
| Communication Compliance | When the data from WhatsApp/WeChat are available in M365 environment, the customer can choose from an extensive list of ready to use policy templates, and review, identify and act on the risks generating from the data, like, abusive/unsolicited messages, any content that violates regulatory policies etc. Refer here for more details. | — Not available — | Full Communication Compliance suite |
| Core eDiscovery | Customer can ‘search’ any specific content from the ingested data as per the need. (e.g. – find messages sent by User A over WhatsApp and in her account since Jan 1, 2021). Multiple keyword and conditions are available that can be used to filter the data. The filtered data can also be ‘exported’ and used if needed. Additionally, the content can be put on ‘HOLD’ for any legal or administrative need. Refer here for more details. | Content Search Hold Export Litigation Hold | Can be used with same features as E3 |
| Advanced eDiscovery | All the features of Core eDiscovery, plus additional analytics capabilities to drive insights are available in Advanced eDiscovery. With this, the customer can preserve, collect, analyze, review and export content from WhatsApp/WeChat as per their internal and external investigations. Refer here for more details. | — Not available — | Content Search Hold Export Litigation Hold Analytical Insights |
| Information Governance | The customer can retain the ingested data from WhatsApp/WeChat as per their need (a month, a year or infinitely). Note that the data at source will be governed by retention policy at the source application. This retention will work on the ingested content from the source. Refer here for more details. | Manual retention label Basic org-wide retention policies Teams message retention policies | Manual retention label Basic org-wide retention policies Rule-based auto-matic retention policies Machine learning based retention Records Management Teams message retention policies |
Archive all employee mobile communication into Microsoft 365
The Microsoft 365 includes built-in connectors for Mobile Archiving:
Regulated firms can now store and monitor all mobile interactions of their regulated employees for compliance scenarios inside their Microsoft 365 Azure Cloud.
TeleMessage offers 12 readymade Mobile archiving connectors to ingest communication directly from mobile carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, TELUS, Rogers, Bell and others.
Enterprises can also capture communication from apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram and Signal, SMS, MMS and Calls from Android devices or from recorded numbers on employee BYOD phones.
The mobile communication integrates with Microsoft Compliance solutions such as Information Governance, Advanced eDiscovery, and Communication Compliance, allowing a single repository for recording and archiving all mobile communication, for compliance with FINRA, SEC, MiFID, FOIA, NARA, Public Records, and other regulations.
For more information check the Microsoft Archiving Connectors page
Key reasons to adopt mobile communication archiving
With the increase in business communication taking place over mobile devices, there are multiple reasons for businesses to adopt mobile communication archiving. However, for the sake of simplicity, we have identified three key reasons for adoption of an effective mobile archiving solution.
Enhanced regulatory compliance
Increasingly, regulatory standards require mobile communications in both public and private sectors to be archived and produced upon public or legal request. For instance, the US SEC and FINRA are key regulators that mandate businesses in the financial area to archive mobile communications. For a business aspiring to comply with such standards, a mobile archiving solution is the first step.
Reduced risk of litigation
Simply, businesses must record all communications and archive text messages of employees to be able to effectively respond to legal enquiries. The level of preparedness and resilience a business must exhibit when an incident occurs is subject to severe and exacting standards.
End user and IT productivity
In addition to features for regulatory compliance such as FINRA text message archiving, these solutions provide organizations the required oversight of all mobile communications. An effective mobile archiving solution in turn eases IT operations related to capturing mobile communications and increases productivity.
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.
