Today most organisations are managing an ever increasing volume of messaging data on behalf of their users. That data typically includes Fax, SMS, IM, Email and scanned content. Commonly this content is the subject of user searches for customer inquiries or compliance reasons and rarely are these message types properly monitored or archived for search and discovery purposes.
Managing that information on behalf of your users is one a many key roles for the information technology team in any organisation. The common answer is move it to the cloud and allow the cloud to manage the content and archive. The corporate compliance monitoring required on company messaging varies between industries however, typically the Company is responsible for ensuring corporate communications are available for assessment by auditors or legal purposes.
Enabling messaging on the cloud has been made reasonably straight forward however recovering that transaction information is not always as simple or straight forward as is suggested. Commonly a detailed search requires either a costly monthly charge per user or a synchronisation of messaging data back to a local device which can take some time and then the search logic across the store rarely covers all data such as attachments.
Further, the cloud stores in their various configurations are also rarely available 100% of the time and when clouds blow away even for a short time the resultant concern and loss of productivity is significant.
Another key issue in messaging relates to the ubiquitous Fax machine which commonly today takes the form of a shared multi function device usually departmentally arranged. These devices remain a key device in organisations for urgent hard copy exchange and as a fail-over for messaging services that are no functioning.
The telephony required to make these services work in an IP world are quite complicated and commonly carriers shy away from any level of guarantee due to the difficulties of fax services working over voice codecs. The reality is that there are advanced IP protocols for Fax which configured correctly can provide suitable in house platforms however many steering committee’s typically attempt to push Fax messaging off to cloud services.
Commonly the issues most organisations list as impediments to effectively managing messaging processes include:
- Ensuring a local copy of a message or transaction is always available for a fast search from any device in case the cloud is not.
- Providing previous client functions like classification and document management interactions.
- Integrating Fax and SMS services from the cloud securely.
- Linking MFD devices to the cloud messaging services and ensuring security of data to and from cloud services.
- Ensuring similar usability from devices such as nationalising numbers irrespective of origin.
- Integrating group security access and billing without exposing user data .
- Customising work flow functions such as cover pages and templates to suit existing customer use of in-house systems.
- Providing secure integration between Email messaging vendor and Fax and SMS vendors.
- Integrating messages automatically with document management systems.
- Complying with industry requirements like PCI, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
- Ensuring corporate messaging data both inbound and outbound is encrypted at rest.
- Providing DLP capabilities for content that should be sent securely rather than over public switch
In answer to these requirements, Preemptive Software offer a Preemptive Message Processor that has been installed in many sites, which can provide a wide range of required functions for in-house including processing traffic to your cloud service. This customer messaging and compliance gateway is a solution that could be deployed internally or externally.>