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by Aware
Collaboration tools like Slack, Teams, and Zoom empower employees to work more effectively, but their tangled datasets present a new nightmare for compliance officers. Here’s how three compliance leaders have overcome the challenges of meeting regulatory requirements in collaboration tools.
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The pandemic forced many organizations to roll out new collaboration tools before traditional compliance and retention solutions had a chance to catch up. These technologies enable asynchronous, remote work, but the same features that make coworking within them so effective also introduce new risks to the enterprise.
How do highly regulated employers ensure they are meeting their obligations under regulations such as HIPAA or FINRA? And how does any organization safeguard sensitive information and intellectual property? In tools that can sync across devices, instantly moving data beyond firewalls, how can any leader demonstrate full compliance if called upon to do so?
Here are the stories of three leaders who have embraced the latest AI technology to support compliance and retention within collaboration tools.
Staying HIPAA compliant in frontline tools
With violation penalties running as high as $50,000 each, HIPAA noncompliance is not an option for healthcare providers and other covered entities. However, controlling the flow of sensitive patient information within the tools used by frontline employees presents unique problems.
One nonprofit healthcare network turned to Aware to surface potentially violating content in real time. Using AI workflows that analyzed frontline messages and attachments in real time, they were able to identify risks and coach employees on the proper handling of protected health information (PHI), safeguarding their patients’ privacy and proactively enforcing HIPAA compliance across the frontline tool.
Read More: Helping Ensure Continued Patient Privacy in Collaboration Tools
Keeping seasonal workers compliant when handling PII
A major challenge for any organization that handles regulated or restricted information is ensuring that seasonal and contract workers follow the same compliance policies and procedures as experienced employees. This was the problem faced by a tech company charged with handling personally identifiable information (PII) for government entities. They turned to Aware for help.
Aware’s AI platform includes automated compliance workflows that can detect PII such as social security numbers, addresses, and dates of birth in real time. The results flagged by Aware can then be transferred effortlessly to existing data loss prevention (DLP) solutions for centralized security and compliance, reducing the company’s exposure to fines and penalties.
Read More: Reducing the Risk of Fines Due to Non-Compliance
Fulfilling retention requirements for regulated employees
For some highly regulated organizations, compliance requirements have been a roadblock to rolling out collaboration tools and taking full advantage of the digital transformation. This puts them at risk of falling behind competitors or losing top talent. This was the case with one financial services provider that found they couldn’t enable collaboration tools for some regulated employees. This created a situation where a segment of the organization felt excluded by their coworkers.
To solve the problem, the company needed a way to create separate retention policies for their regulated employees that overrode companywide retention rules. Aware’s data management features enabled this functionality across their collaboration tools, creating an immutable archive of all the messages of their regulated employees—including revisions and deletions—while purging the content of non-regulated employees according to a regular schedule. In this way, the organization was able to fulfill its legal obligations, secure sensitive data, and improve relations between their employees.
Read More: Easily Implementing Retention Policies for Regulated Employees
Unified compliance across your digital workplace
Discover why Aware is the AI-powered solution trusted by the Fortune 500 to solve compliance and retention challenges in all the places where employees collaborate. Download the free ebook to get more stories of how successful leaders are thriving in the future of work.
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