As new and more stringent privacy and security regulations continue to evolve, non-compliance becomes a major threat to organizations, leading to steep fines and penalties, costly litigation, and lasting reputational damage. With these risks, enterprises can’t afford to assume that the collaboration tools they are using are designed for regulatory compliance. To avoid regulatory risk, enterprises should take a compliance first approach to communication and collaboration with NetSfere’s compliance by design, compliance guaranteed mobile messaging and collaboration platform.

Pandemic-driven remote working significantly increased the use of communications and collaboration tools by U.S. companies with usage growing from 54% of all companies in 2019 to 69% of all companies in 2020. In the rush to keep employees connected and support business continuity, organizations turned to popular communication and collaboration tools that lacked robust administrative controls designed to protect sensitive company data and comply with regulatory requirements.

Collaboration and communication apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp each have vulnerabilities that can jeopardize the ability of organizations to meet regulatory requirements.

For example, the data harvesting practices of WhatsApp are a compliance nightmare for enterprises. The app’s privacy policy states that it can share users’ information such as their phone number, location and contacts with its parent company Facebook. A practice that puts organizations at risk of violating the increasing number of data privacy regulations evolving across the globe.

Enterprises using WhatsApp also have no control over the data their employees transmit across the app and cannot ensure workers are not deliberately or inadvertently violating laws on everything from data privacy to insider trading. Compounding WhatsApp’s compliance risks is the inability of IT administrators to remove employees who leave the company from team message groups or to block their access to all previous message traffic. With WhatsApp, sensitive company data goes right along with departing employees.

Slack and Microsoft Teams also fall into the category of potentially exposing organizations to compliance catastrophes. For example, Microsoft Teams collects data such as chats, voicemail, shared files, recordings and transcriptions, E-mail address, profile picture, and phone number. Microsoft Teams and Slack lack data retention and content sharing policies that can lead to data leakage, putting the enterprise at risk for non-compliance.

Navigating compliance requirements is challenging enough for enterprises today – they don’t need non-compliant communications and collaboration tools elevating this risk.

For secure, compliant communication and collaboration, enterprises should select a solution with compliance designed in. That’s NetSfere.

Designed with robust administrative controls for managing users, monitoring activity, and enforcing corporate policies, NetSfere empowers IT leaders to eliminate compliance risk and take back control of enterprise messaging.

In an environment where enterprises are surrounded by compliance risk, NetSfere is compliance by design, compliance guaranteed.

Contact us today to learn more.