Responding to governance events, like audits, investigations and e-discovery, in the era of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) is hard. IT stakeholders, such as those responsible for compliance archive storage and architecture, responding to search requests from compliance and legal, are overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of today’s modern communications and by the constraints of heritage archiving investments. Unfortunately for those involved, both on the IT and compliance/legal side, search and discovery might consist of a “best guess” effort making it challenging to identify risk or wrongdoing, form a judgment on the merits of a case and at its worse, suffer fines, sanctions, negative verdicts and damage to the organization’s brand and reputation.

The volume of communications for today’s organizations come in the form of textual communications like email, chat, SMS, documents, voice communications and even visual communications like whiteboards or video. In a large organization, with thousands of employees working across multiple communications platforms, content growth can be exponential.

UCC content is also complex. Textual content like chat and email can be embedded with emojis, reactions, images, memes, file attachments and more. All of this needs to be searched and analyzed for potential risk and signals of intent during a digital conversation as rogue users can look to obfuscate their communications behind these tools. Users today often context switch between multiple applications during a conversation. What starts out as a virtual meeting can segue to SMS, a phone call, an email or other forms of communication. In addition, chat conversations can be persistent and take place over days, weeks, months, even years, making it very difficult to encapsulate conversation patterns, relationships, intent and more. Finally, adding to the complexity level, UCC platforms are increasingly meshed, meaning they provide the ability to switch to a different modality (voice, video, etc.) or even a different platform for doing so. How can compliance IT teams keep up?

Legacy approaches to managing regulated data - such as email and voice archives - are struggling to adapt to today’s modern communication requirements. These archive systems can serve as containers for regulated information to be safeguarded and locked away, but with enormous and numerous trade offs. These include redundant costs, loss of productivity, and increasing complexity, as they grapple to meet the constant evolution of changing UCC platforms and their continual improvements and feature additions. Responding to governance events can also mean that compliance IT stakeholders must pivot between these archive silos, conducting multiple search attempts and results and manually assembling a case or data investigation set. In addition, legacy systems lack the capability to capture and retain communications with full context across all UCC modalities, making it very difficult for compliance, legal and risk teams to piece together a digital conversation that as mentioned, can encompass text, voice and visual communications. Keyword search, the historical and primary means of navigating archived email conversations, is inadequate as a standalone capability in the face of today’s volume and complexity challenges, making it challenging to respond to external and internal requests for information. All of this is compounded by constrained time frames, such as when dictated by a judge’s or regulatory body’s order. 

In response to this, Theta Lake has developed Unified Search, Discovery and Replay. With it, organizations can:

• Efficiently aggregate all of the necessary data, across different modalities, meshed environments and timelines providing a complete “big picture”
• Deliver a unified view of a user across their various digital identities, to eliminate gaps during investigations
• Identify conversation patterns and outliers/suspicious patterns in communications to enable further drill down
• Review associated documents and access patterns and histories associated with communications investigations
  
  

Theta Lake Unified Search, Discovery and Replay uses a variety of technologies, including Generative AI, visualizations, dashboards and digital identity mapping along with rapid and accurate keyword search to help organizations produce the necessary records and search results, without over collecting data to help compliance, legal and risk management teams respond quickly to governance events.

We’ve produced a white paper, Addressing Compliance Search and Discovery Needs, we invite you to take a look.