Protect Yourself with Centralized Recording and Storage

The critical business reasons for migrating your voice recordings from tape, to digital, continue to mount.  First and foremost, many legacy TDM/tape-based recording systems are reaching end-of-life.  Then, there are those perennial issues around liability, security, compliance and efficiency.  While these problems will continue if you remain in a tape recording environment, you can allay all of these problems by migrating to a centralized, VoIP digital recording and centralized archiving solution.  It provides all of the security, compliance and efficiency advantages you need, plus a whole lot more.  An open-platform VoIP based recording system is also future-proofed, running on standard industry hardware, so you will never again get stuck with an obsolete recorder.

In this article we will cover the core areas where an IP-based recording system drives significant value to your business, including security and confidentiality, liability protection and compliance.

Security and Confidentiality

One of the single most important factors to consider when operating in a tape environment is the security and confidentiality of your critical business information, and how your existing system is leaving you highly vulnerable.  The physical nature of the tapes themselves alone leaves the door open to potential problems.  Suppose you need to share recordings between offices or locations, and your tapes can get lost in the mail.  Now imagine they happen to contain highly sensitive customer information like names, accounts and social security numbers.  You would undoubtedly face a wrath of public outcry, a total Public Relations nightmare and certain legal fallout if this news became public.  Then there are the problems surrounding tape degradation and the integrity of your recorded calls year after year.   

With centralized digital archiving there are no tapes to get lost or to degrade.  Your calls are digitized, encrypted and made available electronically.  This mitigates possible vulnerability points and dramatically reduces your risk.

Liability Protection

All business communication (including recorded customer conversations) is fair game in today's courts, meaning it is discoverable during litigation.  TDM/analog-based systems are not sophisticated enough to selectively keep certain recordings while erasing others.  Therefore, problems can arise.  Suppose you are required by law to hold onto some of the calls contained on a specific tape.  You would be forced to keep the whole tape - including any other recordings you had wanted not to retain.  It is easy to see how problematic this can become during times of litigation.  These are risks you can no longer afford to take.

However, in a centralized archiving and digital recording environment, you have the ability to selectively (or have the recording system automatically) keep some calls while deleting others.  This solves the problem of having unwanted recordings pulled into litigation inadvertently.  Your recordings can be automatically destroyed once they are no longer required to be kept - say after 30 days or even seven years.  Whatever the specified time period is, your new recording system has the automation and rule-based retention capabilities to work in the background to help you mitigate your risk. 

When a legal dispute does arise, and you need to quickly locate all relevant recordings that could exonerate your organization, your company will be able to quickly locate specific recordings in mere seconds - as well as other related interactions that may be germane to the case.  This can help with early case assessment and accelerate the entire exoneration process.  In a tape environment, on the other hand, you are left having to wade through hours and hours of calls in order to find that needle-in-a-haystack recording. It is also equally as difficult and time consuming to simultaneously identify similar recordings - perhaps from the same customer. 

New speech analytics technology in the call center can help in this area as well, in terms of assisting in the collection and preservation of calls.  Keyword spotting capabilities can help you uncover customer interactions that need to be retained, for example, for a certain period of time due to the sensitive nature of the call.  These speech analytics technologies ought to be tightly integrated into your total recording solution to offer the most accurate, seamless operation.

Compliance

With the multitude of internal and external regulations in business today, organizations face very unique challenges in terms of maintaining compliance.  In turn, security, flexibility and automation quickly become important factors to consider. These issues are easily dealt with in an electronic recording environment.  Newer, open VoIP recording solutions enable organizations to leverage NAS or SAN storage devices to provide the protection and capabilities they need.  Such storage systems can offer highly advanced encryption, storage, retrieval and even audit trail functionality that will help your business maintain compliance, protect sensitive information and ensure only authorized access to sensitive information.  Tape-based recording solutions don't offer this level of sophistication and capability.  

However, when backed by advanced mass storage devices, some recording systems provide the absolute highest levels of security, preservation and resiliency.  Along with seamless integration to the storage device, they can offer AES audio encryption, MD5 fingerprinting and more - to secure all audio files against unauthorized replay, alteration or editing.

Furthermore, when it is necessary to grant specific authorized individuals access to identified recordings, you will want to employ the required levels of rigor and scrutiny to ensure business protection and compliance.  For this purpose, there are innovative workflow authorization replay applications that are already being used today by some of the largest financial institutions in the world.  These applications provide the necessary framework to control how, when, and who can replay calls from the recording system.  This protection and automation brings much needed peace of mind to your business and minimizes resource expenditure to manage the playback process.

A VoIP communications and recording infrastructure also adds a certain level of control to your organization in terms of the ability to easily and efficiently manage sensitive electronic information without having to worry about maintaining tapes, tracking multiple copies of the same call, and so on.

Specific benefits of the workflow authorization replay application include:

• Control - authorization automation rules out mistakes or delays within the workflow process
• Compliance - authorization for replaying a call will always adhere to the organization's compliance rules
• Efficiency - paperwork is reduced and manual processes are replaced by a completely automated process
• Flexibility - the workflow process can be configured to meet any compliance procedures in place

Maintaining a fully compliant and highly secure business environment today demands much needed tools and capabilities that may not have been as necessary years prior.  Ever-tightening industry regulations coupled with rampant public outcry for protection of personal information has made the case for tapes an obsolete one.  The only way to maintain the necessary levels of security and compliance today is to migrate way from tapes as your means of storing customer interactions and instead move to a new, highly advanced IP-based recording solution. Once you make the switch, you'll never look over your shoulder again and your business as a whole will be all the better for it.

Author:

Tony Procops, President & CEO, CyberTech North America

Tony Procops, founder, President and CEO of CyberTech North America, has over 25 years experience leading recording technology companies. Recognized as an outstanding business executive, Tony is a dynamic leader who has built businesses in diverse settings from industry leading organizations to start-ups. With domestic and international experience, Tony offers a unique global perspective to CyberTech's future growth strategy.

Prior to CyberTech North America, Tony was Senior Vice President and General Manager of ASC (News - Alert) telecom, where he established its North American subsidiary in 1998 and oversaw all its operations. While there he built a successful national and international sales channel. Due to his expertise in implementing successful sales programs, he has been able to create teams and programs that have secured substantial new business orders and many long term agreements with global sales partners across a diverse customer segment.

Prior positions include Vice President of Healthcare and Regional Vice President of Voice Recording at Dictaphone Corporation. While there he developed his extensive enterprise systems sales background, coupled with a strong track record of enhancing and creating sales teams, Tony has demonstrated success in building business opportunity pipelines. Before that, he served 15 years at Lanier Worldwide in field and management sales positions.

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