Modern Comms, Missing Controls: Why Digital Governance Needs a Rethink

Theta Lake's recently published Compliance & Security Report 2024/25 shines a light on how modern communication complexity is overwhelming compliance efforts particularly within regulated industries. It shows that over a third of organisations now use seven or more collaboration platforms, while two-thirds fear that staff are using unmonitored channels in their work.

The downloadable report (registration required) highlights rising risks from GenAI, configuration drift, and feature disabling. These, plus other issues, create blind spots in digital governance that open organisations to risk from regulatory breaches and potentially significant fines if data is not managed and secured properly.

The report shows that organisations need smarter tools, not more restrictions, to manage their communication channels and data. It recommends a shift to a Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) governance strategy that delivers a UCC-driven workplace.

Download The Report for Free

Download the full Compliance & Security Report 2024/25 to discover detailed insights and recommendations. For MSPs in Ireland looking to protect their clients with cutting-edge compliance solutions, contact Renaissance for expert advice on Theta Lake's comprehensive digital communications governance platform.

Read on for some highlights from the report.

Too Many Tools

A striking statistic in the report reveals that over a third of organisations use seven or more UCC tools across their staff. These tools include Teams, Slack, Zoom, Asana, and others. The proportion of users employing seven or more UCC tools has risen from 17% in 2023 to 35% in the latest survey data. This growth is driven by employee demand for flexibility and the need for specific business applications for particular workflows.

The upward trend in UCC tool usage shows no sign of slowing down. Just under half (47%) of respondents featured in the Compliance & Security Report 2024/25 expect the number of UCC tools they use to increase further over the next year. This rise is primarily driven by project management and workstream tools. Enterprise social collaboration platforms are also anticipated to contribute to the growth, especially in organisations that have adopted remote and hybrid working practices.

This proliferation incurs both visible and hidden costs for the business. Each additional tool can lead to another compliance gap, data silo, or attack surface for cybercriminals to exploit.

The Visibility Gap

Even more concerning than the large number of organisations reporting increasing use of communication tools is the fact that nearly two-thirds of survey respondents believe it is likely their staff are using apps and channels that the organisation's IT team is not aware of. This highlights that a majority of organisations lack confidence in their oversight of internal business communications.

Another challenge to UC compliance is configuration drift, or settings that have been changed without proper protocol to address those changes. There is a hidden IT cost from time spent reviewing configuration drift as teams manually check approved channels against the features that are turned on in the UC platform. With Theta Lake Unified Capture, you can view an activity log of who has made changes to a UC platform, monitor which settings have changed, and get alerts when settings change.

Disabling Features Isn't a Viable Response

In response to the growth of UCC tools and the possibility of unknown communication channels being used, many organisations (54%) resort to disabling platform features on their deployed software solutions. This is done to prevent these features from being used for communication sessions that cannot be monitored or archived, to comply with regulations, discovery, and governance rules.

Many firms recognise that this approach increases the pressure on staff to find workarounds and use tools that are not officially approved, further exacerbating the UCC proliferation problem. This tension between restricted official communication channels and staff seeking the easiest way to carry out their work results in decreased staff satisfaction and lower productivity.

Instead of removing features, a smarter approach is to ensure that all tools being used are effectively captured, supervised, and the data retained. This is something most legacy archiving tools simply weren't designed to do.

Rethinking Digital Governance

The report makes it clear that organisations need to rethink their governance for digital communication tools. This is particularly critical for regulated industries such as financial services, where the survey data originates and compliance requirements are most stringent. This rethink must acknowledge the following realities for UCC in the modern workplace:

⁃ Unified, Not Siloed - Traditional approaches that treat email, voice, chat, video, and file sharing as separate domains are no longer viable. Modern work happens across multiple platforms, and governance must follow suit.

⁃ Proactive, Not Reactive - Waiting to discover new features after employees start using them creates compliance gaps. Effective governance requires real-time visibility into platform configurations and automated detection of changes.

⁃ Comprehensive, Not Selective - Disabling features to avoid compliance challenges is ultimately counterproductive. Instead, organisations need governance tools capable of handling modern communication solutions.

⁃ Cloud-Native, Not Legacy - With many firms moving voice recording and archiving to the cloud, governance solutions must be built for cloud-scale performance and innovation, not retrofitted from legacy on-premises architectures.

The Partner Opportunity

For IT Security Resellers and MSPs, this shift in digital governance represents more than just a compliance challenge, it is a clear opportunity. By helping customers secure and manage their expanding collaboration environments, partners can position themselves as trusted advisors at a critical point of need. This not only strengthens client relationships but also opens access to new revenue streams that previously didn’t exist, from advanced compliance services to ongoing governance support. In short, partners who embrace solutions like Theta Lake can create tangible value for their customers while unlocking sustainable, profitable growth for their own business.

How Theta Lake Can Help

Theta Lake is a pioneer in Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA) with cutting-edge capture, archive connectors, compliance archiving, and supervision. Designed in collaboration with UCC providers, their solution ensures fast, effective compliance across all modalities, encouraging feature adoption and improved productivity.

Backed by Cisco, RingCentral, Salesforce, and Zoom, Theta Lakes' multi-award-winning product suite provides compliance and security for modern collaboration platforms via integrations for communications solutions such as RingCentral, Webex by Cisco, Microsoft 365 and Teams, Slack, Zoom, Movius, Box, Mural, Asana, plus over 100 other integrations.

Theta Lake enables organisations to safely, compliantly, and cost-effectively expand their use of unified communication platforms by enabling capture, compliance archiving, and acting as a connector for existing archives across video, voice, and chat collaboration systems.

Read the report to discover how you can get a handle on your disparate UCC tools. Talk to Renaissance to find out more about the Theta Lake suite of products if you are an IT Security Reseller or MSP in Ireland.