Cloud Capture for Today’s Electronic Communications
Companies today are deeply reliant on electronic communications tools to collaborate internally and connect with customers. In regulated industries such as financial services, those communications must be preserved and monitored as a measure of accountability. This is typically accomplished with the help of technology solutions that capture content from the channels an organization uses to do business: email, voice calls, chat, and so on.
The number and variety of channels and the volume of electronic communications data being generated is growing exponentially. We are no longer in an era of simply using “work email.” The typical modern worker uses a combination of channels (text messages, personal emails, instant messages, social media platforms, chat apps, etc.) and devices (work/personal phone, work/personal computer) to get work done.
The proliferation of remote work and digital communications tools has also gained the attention of risk-averse organizations outside of regulated industries. Capturing company communications can provide a strong safeguard against legal issues that arise from misconduct and a consolidated view of content for potential e-discovery events.
Limitations with dated capture technology
Unfortunately, the available solutions for capturing the variety and measure of today’s many options for communication are lacking. Organizations are using legacy capture technologies created for a time when work email was the primary method of business communication. These tools are not equipped to accommodate each new channel that emerges, nor scale to handle the increasing volume of data being generated.
Many legacy tools are narrowly focused point solutions that address each channel individually (e.g., a tool that only captures email, another tool for web, yet another for SMS/text messages). This ends up creating a cumbersome mix of unintegrated technologies that are costly to license, maintain and administer.
Clumsily architected approaches to content capture often blend on-premise and private cloud deployments. They can’t scale horizontally, have limited processing speeds, and on-premise or private cloud solutions mean a single point of failure if data loss or outages occur. This is unacceptable in an era where robust public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure exist.
A purpose-built cloud capture solution can help organizations level up their systems, save time and money, and stay ahead of legal or regulatory risks.
Possibilities with a modern cloud-native capture solution
Cloud Capture from Smarsh is the first cloud-native capture solution on the market, designed to support the proactive collection of electronic communications. Whether managing everyday compliance requirements or an unexpected e-discovery request, Cloud Capture should be the first choice for your business:
- Continuous availability: Self-replicating, horizontally scalable data clusters across geographically distributed availability zones provide constant availability of application services
- Unlimited on-demand scaling: Elastically scale based on your workloads by leveraging the underlying cloud infrastructure
- Deployment flexibility: Deploy anywhere in the world based on your data residency requirements
- State-of-the-art security: Public cloud infrastructures such as AWS and Azure continuously enhance their perimeter security, protecting customer data hosted in their cloud
- Agile delivery of updates: New features and bug fixes are continuously delivered, leveraging our continuous integration and delivery infrastructure and agile execution practices
- Native format and fidelity: All content is stored in its original format, preserving context (such as its place in a thread or conversation) and authenticity, meaning compliance and legal reviewers can quickly assess the merits of the case without having to piece together content elements
While the mechanisms for various channels may differ slightly, they are established at the outset of your deployment and remain “always-on” for proactive, ongoing capture of all your communications data. You can also be selective in your approach, capturing content only from specified users or channels.
The proliferation of both communication solutions and the sheer volume of content has made capture technology important to every industry, regardless of the business sector. Cloud Capture offers businesses the ability to modernize their capture solution within existing technology infrastructure and be set up to meet future-state goals.
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