Information Governance

Solutions for protecting and enabling your electronic communications data

The proliferation of communications tools has made information management an even greater challenge for modern businesses. Without the right governance technology, businesses are exposing themselves to significant risk, including data loss, security vulnerabilities, and the inability to enforce their own policies. Smarsh advanced capture and archiving solutions enable firms to securely deliver business communications to a centrally managed content repository. Our solutions cover the industry’s widest array of cutting-edge communications channels. This ensures firms can carry out proactive governance policies made for specific channels with real-time monitoring, feature controls, blocking and alerting.

Key information governance challenges

Challenges

Our Solutions

Comprehensive capture

Archiving is not only a requirement to satisfy regulatory obligations. Conversations that are happening with your customers right now over Slack, Microsoft Teams and via text messaging can provide tremendous value to your business. Communications records can be leveraged to better understand your customer, improve service delivery, and better respond to customer issues. This requires that you capture messages, as well as the events and metadata that are created in those customer and prospect conversations. Today, Smarsh supports over 100 different communication channels with direct source capture. Content is captured in its native format, and in full conversational context, with message threading to show how conversations began and developed. This enables businesses to harness this information as a business asset within archiving systems, CRM applications, or other data repositories.

Advanced capture

For some, capture and archiving is an all-or-nothing proposition. However, capturing and delivering all communications content to a long-term, immutable archive can result in the retention of items that should not be preserved. This can range from communications that misuse intellectual property to the use of restricted words or phrases – actions that could have been blocked or remediated before messages are archived. Policy enforcement can include the ability to execute pre-archive controls such as disabling ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ features in social media for regulated users. It can also provide the ability to capture multiple versions of a document that were edited in a collaboration tool. Smarsh advanced capture capabilities enable firms to govern business communications with sophisticated policy controls. These include message blocking, moderation, feature controls, disclaimers, as well as the enforcement of ethical wall restrictions in supported networks. These capabilities provide earlier insights into communications that allow firms to apply good governance controls proactively, preventing larger issues from arising later.

Robust retention

There is no ‘one size fits all’ to retention policies. Retention is a function of its value as an asset and its importance to litigation and regulatory events. Today, that value can live in the content of a text message, in a persistent chat on Slack, or within a Microsoft Teams meeting. Effective governance is not leaving the retention decision in the hands of content source providers, who know little to nothing of your specific retention strategy. Organizations need a solution that can adapt to the specific regulatory, litigation, records management, and geographic needs for each country or region in which they operate.

Smarsh enables your organization to capture and preserve your records with robust policy management capabilities. These can be applied globally or uniquely to each content source or geographic region. Archived data is then stored in an unalterable, centrally managed repository to meet even the most demanding regulatory requirements. Once data has reached the end of its retention period, it can be defensibly disposed. This ensures that you retain only the information that continues to add value to your business.

Enterprise Archive

Firms can no longer view archived data as ‘historical’. It is now frequently considered as an asset that can impact a firm’s business health, customer relationships, and competitive positioning. Governance controls need to limit access to data based on defined roles, while fulfilling specific business processes. Due to recently introduced data privacy regulations, simply allowing access to specific features and users is no longer an option for effective information governance.

The Smarsh Enterprise Archive provides customizable access controls. This allows firms to define specific roles that can access archived data, along with the unique features that those roles are entitled to access.

Top-end data protection

Cybersecurity concerns remain ever-present. Data privacy regulations continue to evolve, both domestically and in other regions around the world. What both cybersecurity and data privacy demand is the right infrastructure and controls to ensure that information is always protected. This requires investment in solutions to quickly identify risk and enable firms to address any inquiry at the largest scale.

Smarsh was designed for firms with the most demanding security and data privacy requirements. Smarsh provides a multi-layered approach to information protection, across data, applications, and networks.

Ready to enable compliant productivity?

Join the 6,500+ customers using Smarsh to drive their business forward.