The seismic shift in communications habits caused by the pandemic has left regulated businesses needing to accommodate new platforms while also complying with any applicable regulations. This is particularly challenging now as the return-to-office movement has seen growing numbers of workers return to the office, yet there is still a need to participate and collaborate digitally in activities with remote workers and customers. Compliance needs to be assured across all environments and continue uninterrupted, even as the means and methods of communication change.

“Zoom went from infancy to adulthood overnight at the start of the pandemic and came out of it with a rich portfolio of offerings but, when you think about compliance, the use cases are blurring,” explains Blane Warrene, Vice President of Product Management at Smarsh.

“You might start a call in the office on your Zoom account and then leave the office on your mobile phone but still be on the Zoom call. Our job is to make sure that’s possible for a regulated business.”

Warrene says this is a critical priority for regulated businesses in the US, Europe, and the UK, but globally, regulators are placing greater burdens on businesses. “Regulators want to know if you are certain that you have a policy and technology in place that enables employees to go where they want,” he adds.

To support this, synchronisation is essential to help ensure changes by users don’t impact the audit trail of compliance. “Zoom has done a great job,” confirms Warrene. “The most important thing was the introduction of Zoom Phone, and Zoom became obsessive about synchronisation. This creates a familiar experience for users, when technology at work behaves in the same way as consumer technology, it becomes invisible and non-intrusive to the users.”

To help enable compliance across platforms such as Zoom Phone, Smarsh spends significant time aligning with Zoom’s roadmap, so it can build the compliance utilities and connections that businesses need. This also involves influencing the roadmaps of Zoom and other businesses, based on the building blocks for compliance that Smarsh can help provide, so businesses can readily add compliance capabilities.

The technological challenges should not be underestimated. “It’s one thing to say we do Zoom communication capture, but it’s a completely different challenge to do it at scale, with real depth and globally,” explains Warrene. “Being able to perform capture of Zoom data in Hong Kong, the US, and Europe, for example, and to do so in ways that are compliant in each jurisdiction is the key. We bring that at-scale compliance which is aligned to all the regulated markets involved in an interaction.”

“Whether it’s employees using the Zoom app on their laptops or using their mobile phones to participate in a Zoom meeting, or an employee receiving and sending SMS text messages with their Zoom Phone app on their phone,” adds Warrene, “our job is to ensure we’re integrated into the Zoom API ecosystem to help support comprehensive data capture for compliance purposes regardless of the use case end-user experience.

This provides the opportunity for a company to say they have the policy and technology in place, and they can validate their policy through their supervision of how employees use various Zoom solutions. That’s what customers want, the ability to validate their compliance.”

Smarsh provides Zoom with content capture, archiving, and monitoring capabilities that help enable regulated organizations to meet their digital communications oversight requirements while taking advantage of Zoom’s market-leading collaboration solutions. Smarsh supports communications across all Zoom One modalities, including Zoom Phone, and can deliver services in large-scale (10,000+ users) deployments. Smarsh was awarded the 2023 Zoom Meetings/Rooms Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Connect Partner of the Year award by Zoom at Zoomtopia Partner Connect 2023.

To learn more about how Smarsh and Zoom are helping the financial service industry to meet collaboration and data compliance needs at scale, please read our latest webinar brief.



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