REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 24, 2014) - Actiance, the leading provider of compliance, security, archiving and eDiscovery for all critical business communications, today announced the general availability of its governance solution for Microsoft Office 365, including Exchange Online and Lync Online. Actiance now allows organizations to capture, monitor, archive and review Exchange Online emails and Lync Online instant messaging.
"We continue to meet the needs of our customers to mitigate risks as they move their applications and data to the cloud," said Scott Whitney, Vice President of Product Management at Actiance. "We are committed to supporting our customers with the Actiance Governance Platform whether they are deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model -- ensuring they are compliant, and litigation ready."
According to Rich Costello, IDC's Senior Research Analyst for Unified Communications and Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, "Microsoft reports that 60 percent of enterprises today have deployed or are planning to deploy either Microsoft Lync on-premises or Microsoft Lync Online in the cloud, whether standalone or via the Office 365 suite. IDC expects a compound annual growth rate in the 20-30 percent range over the next few years for Lync." Generally speaking, data from the recent IDC 2014 Enterprise Communications Survey indicates that 53 percent of respondents have current/planned UC implementations in the cloud, representing a significant increase in cloud deployment plans from the 42 percent reflected in IDC's last survey.
For regulated companies, FINRA, SEC, FERC, and other agency regulations require supervisory and recordkeeping capabilities for real-time communication channels. "But this is also becoming a growing concern for non-regulated companies," said Kris Vann, Information Governance Counsel at Actiance. "Cases are going beyond email now. IM and social forum communications are increasingly showing up in lawsuits around employee harassment, discrimination, product liability, defamation, breach of contract and other types of civil litigation. Companies have eDiscovery obligations to capture, collect and preserve IM and forum content when litigation is imminent. In certain circumstances the duty to supervise arises even earlier."
Basic archiving capabilities are available on native Office 365 Lync Online, but there are major gaps that make it insufficient for meeting governance requirements for most organizations. Greg Buckles, founder and research consultant for the eDJ Group, explains that "Lync Online IMs are stored in individual user mailboxes rather than to the Lync archiving database. Users can disable IM conversation history. There is no centralized management functionality to monitor or ensure tamper-proof protections for IMs or file transfers."
The Actiance Governance Platform helps organizations meet supervisory, recordkeeping and eDiscovery obligations for Office 365 for both Exchange Online and Lync Online. To improve their governance of Office 365, organizations can use Vantage to monitor communications to identify business critical content needing to be retained, and scan for compliance events needing review by a supervisor. They can then archive email and IM in Alcatraz, the first context-aware™cloud archive, a repository for all their critical communications, which reduces the cost of eDiscovery by uniquely displaying dynamic social content in context. Actiance ensures chain of custody through tamper-proof capture and archiving to a WORM-compliant repository.
Additional Information
- Become a fan of Actiance: http://www.facebook.com/actiance
- Follow Actiance on Twitter: www.twitter.com/actiance
About Actiance
Actiance® is the global leader in communication, collaboration, and social media governance for the enterprise. Its governance platform is used by millions of professionals across dozens of industries. With the power of communication, collaboration, and social media at their fingertips, Actiance helps professionals everywhere to engage with customers and colleagues so they can unleash social business. The Actiance platform gives organizations the ability to ensure compliance for all their communications channels. It provides real-time content monitoring, centralized policy management, contextual capture of content and context-aware™ archiving which improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of eDiscovery and helps protect users from malware and accidental or malicious leakage of information. Actiance supports all leading email, social media, unified communications, collaboration, and IM platforms, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), Twitter, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Skype, IBM, (IBM), Jive (JIVE), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Salesforce.com (CRM).
Actiance headquarters are in Redwood City, California. For more information, visit http://www.actiance.com or call 1-888-349-3223.