Corporate Cell Phone Compliance, the time is coming

It's taken fewer number of years for the cell phone to become as ubiquitous as e-mail.

Until, e-mail reached the point of the reliability of a dial-tone - not to many years back -  it could not have been deemed ubiquitous. There are many factors, the snow ball effect, that needs to come to fruition simultaneously for any single technology to reach the point of being truly ubiquitous.

In the case of email you have storage - the cost of storage, and storage technological advancements as major components that needed to mature in order for email to be part of the dial-tone reliability age.

Also, data-center advancements in cooling, smaller form factors, basically servers doing a lot more, in less space with less power and networking from the cost and technology advancements of routers and switches - and emergence of widely used protocols to emerging standards that made it easier for everyone to talk the same language without the overhead and errors of bridges and translation.

Note, that it wasn't to long ago when servers spoke IPX/SPX, DEC LAT, NetBeui we were working with Token Ring, Banyan Vines, etc. It's rare to find any of these today on the average corporations LAN.

All of these together, have combined to bring the reliability of a dial-tone to e-mail.  And it didn't take long.

I find it amazing, how so much attention - from a compliance, records management, classification, long term retention, legal discovery, etc. perspective - has been paid to electronic communications over the last 5 years, yet another technology that has evolved to the state of being ubiquitous, is used more so and at much lower costs than email, and is as creating a new wave of text messaging, is as prevalent a communication tool, if not more so, than email has received so little attention - the cell phone.

A quick look at the industry which has, in essence, started it all is the financial services industry, specially the broker dealer space. They gave birth to the e-mail supervision industry with regulations which required that certain e-mails be supervised. The regulations were broad enough that it gave room for wide interpretations and with little to no teeth , at least early on, enforcement and compliance was lackadaisical.

Vendors came and went and emails were supervised, but not retained, since the regulations didn't require retention, just supervision.

This went on for sometime, then post ENRON, a definite point in time, came the requirement to 'retain' these same communications, plus the inclusion of instant messaging with email.

These were definitely a monkey wrench, because the same system that was designed to supervise email had no concept of long-term retention and although instant messaging looked like another message on the surface, the issues took a while to iron out, and generated yet another breed of vendor specialized and focused on instant messaging capture.

It all amounted to higher volumes, increased processing and a new technological direction was needed to meet the new requirements, archival software.

Comments

[Peter Mojica]

I made this original post sometime ago. I can say in talking with several high profile customers (and regulators) that the time is coming for "cell phone compliance". In the broker dealer industry traders desks have been connected to voice recorded systems for over a decade now. However, the voice data is not "easily accessible" and it has always been a "just in case" usage of the voice recordings, and the most that was done from an IT perspective was a semi-annual audit to make sure that the machines doing the voice recordings were actually working. The realization is finally coming to the forefront that with all of teh hoopala around corporate compliance, supervising of communications, etc. That their is a big gaping hole attached to every sensitive employees belt, their cell phone. This is how it will start - first will be a collection of the CSID (caller information) data, for every info sensitive employee. You will subscribe to a corporate cell phone provider who will automatically send the needed data from the invoice to your company, they will process the data and have hotlist of numbers that are suspect and this information will be supervised. So watch who you call. Next step, will be the cell phone voice content. Things will continue to get interesting, as this will do to "systems" 10x what email has done. And its just a few short years away.