In a recent article published to the Corporate Compliance Insights website, Mike Pagani, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Chief Evangelist at Smarsh, explores how communications archival has shifted roles in recent years as newer communications channels emerge to compete with email. Many organizations, Pagani points out, have a history of reacting to new communications technology with blanket prohibition. The idea is that by prohibiting a channel, you can eliminate any risk that may lie within. In theory, that seems sound, but in practice it falls apart for two key reasons.

First, modern, non-email communications channels are often significantly more convenient than email, especially when you’re trying to communicate rapidly. Citing CTIA data, Pagani points out that while the average response time for a text message is 90 seconds, the average response time for an email is 90 minutes. Often, that’s time your employees cannot afford to spare, so they’ll turn to faster solutions, regardless of any regulations put into place by their employer. End result? Your prohibition efforts fail as employees simply sidestep them to remain productive. Second, prohibition cuts your organization off from valuable tools. Employees utilize newer communications channels because they’re convenient, fast, and reliable. Those are traits that could enhance your organization’s overall communications efforts, but only if you avoid implementing a policy of prohibition.

Fortunately, modern, comprehensive archiving solutions solve both problems. “Rather than saying no to the adoption of the channels that employees know they need to use to be more productive, stay competitive, and service their client bases properly, the organizations that are getting ahead have chosen to implement archiving platforms that support all of the channels and govern the content the same way they do their email,” Pagani writes. Not only does a comprehensive solution eliminate the need for managing risk through prohibition — which, we can’t stress enough, does not work — it allows your organization to utilize modern communications channels without worrying that doing so generates additional compliance risk.

“Archiving is now being seen as a valuable business tool for what it allows the business to do as a result of making today’s dynamic communication methods safe to adopt and leverage, while also adding value to other parts of the business beyond compliance, such as legal teams,” Pagani concludes. “The future of archiving technology also holds a lot of promise for deriving business insights from the retained messages and content with the evolution of built-in analytics capabilities – something to look forward to as one more reason to start archiving all electronic communications used for business sooner versus later.”

To read the full article, visit Corporate Compliance Insights.