The Best Theta Lake Alternatives for Security and Regulatory Compliance

Theta Lake offers risk detection and compliance archiving across various collaboration platforms. Using prebuilt policies, legal and security teams can detect noncompliant behaviors in audio, video, and chat communications, search tools like Slack, Zoom, Teams, and Cisco Webex by metadata and keywords, and execute legal holds on the results. 

Using Theta Lake, organizations can support compliance in virtual environments, especially video and audio meetings. However, Theta Lake might not be the right solution for every business. In this post, we review top Theta Lake competitors for security and compliance so you can make an informed decision about which is the best vendor for your needs. 

Contents

• How Theta Lake Falls Short as a Security and Regulatory Compliance Solution 
• Theta Lake Competitors for Security and Regulatory Compliance
  • Theta Lake Alternative: Aware
  • Theta Lake Alternative: Global Relay Archive
  • Theta Lake Alternative: Netskope
  • Theta Lake Alternative: Nightfall AI
  • Theta Lake Alternative: Smarsh

How Theta Lake Falls Short as a Security and Regulatory Compliance Solution

While users appreciate Theta Lake’s archiving and regulatory compliance features, it does have some shortfalls compared with leading alternatives. For example, Theta Lake only batch ingests and analyzes content, meaning it cannot offer real-time monitoring or remediation. To compensate, Theta Lake offers Realtime Compliance Advisor, an AI assistant that shares predefined acceptable use reminders during live calls. However, this is not as effective as performing dynamic content analysis in real time. 

The time between batch data ingests also creates gaps where sensitive data can be lost, or bad actors cover their tracks. This limits Theta Lake’s capabilities as a true data security solution as it may not be able to proactively prevent data loss in all instances. 

Other shortfalls of Theta Lake include:

• Limited context for text chats compared with audio/video 
• Lack of NLP-powered sentiment or toxicity analysis 
• Some reviewers note a high number of false positive results 

Finally, Theta Lake’s audio/video-first approach means it has less contextual understanding and real-time visibility of written chat communications such as occur in Slack and Teams, where employees do most of their collaborating. Depending on how your organization runs, this could result in significant data security weaknesses. 

Theta Lake Competitors for Security and Regulatory Compliance

Theta Lake Alternative: Aware

Aware is an AI-native platform offering security, compliance, and DLP for collaboration tools. Aware connects natively to platforms like Slack, Teams, and Zoom and continuously ingests and analyzes content in real time to identify compliance and acceptable use policy violations using a wide range of AI/ML models and workflows tailored to each individual organization’s digital environment. 

Aware closes the gaps left in modern tools by legacy security systems, mitigating risks by increasing visibility into collaboration content, enabling granular archiving and retention for regulatory compliance, and tackling malicious and negligent insider threats at source. 

Aware’s proprietary natural language processing (NLP) AI is proven to outperform all leading competitors, including Google, Meta, and Microsoft, for sentiment analysis accuracy, reducing false positives and giving organizations greater insight into the context behind security incidents for more effective management and swifter remediation. 

Using Aware, companies can: 

• Manage multiple tools from a secure, centralized dashboard 
• Surface and mitigate risks in real time 
• Automate customizable DLP and employee coaching 

Theta Lake Alternative: Global Relay Archive

Global Relay Archive supports compliant data retention for email, instance messaging, social media, and voice, unifying unstructured data from disparate sources into a central cloud store. This preserves data and makes it searchable, satisfying eDiscovery and compliance requirements. 

Once stored, data in Global Relay Archive is enriched by AI models to add context and extract insights. These features help add value to the data and make it accessible for further model training. However, at its core Global Relay Archive is a retention tool, and as such it lacks functionality to proactively detect or mitigate data security threats offered by Theta Lake and other competitors. 

Additionally, reviewers have noted that canceling the service can be "a nightmare," with hidden costs to download data that “effectively [hold] your data hostage.” 

Theta Lake Alternative: Netskope

Netskope’s cloud security platform offers a wide range of features to protect data and enforce compliance in digital collaboration tools. Some of Netskope’s core features include compliance controls, cloud security, and threat protection by managing access to restricted tools and correlating file uploads and downloads to track data movement. 

 While both Netskope and Theta Lake offer solutions to protect collaboration data, its approach is more aligned to proactive access management rather than retroactive data analysis. Netskope also has limited AI/ML capabilities and lacks the contextual insights offered by other vendors, and reviewers note that Netskope “is not easy to integrate” with other security tools, and it can “impact the internet speed on end user machines,” incentivizing users to find workarounds that may introduce more risk into the digital environment. 

Learn more about Netskope for collaboration security and compliance 

Theta Lake Alternative: Nightfall AI

Nightfall AI offers cloud-based DLP for various applications and endpoints. Nightfall AI searches data from SaaS, email, and generative AI using keyword and regex detection to surface and redact sensitive and regulated data. However, reviewers note that Nightfall AI struggles to identify sensitive information outside of predefined patterns, and this lack of sensitivity means that the number of false positives generated can lead to “alert fatigue.” 

Like Theta Lake, Nightfall AI can also have gaps in its ingestion record. For example, running a historical scan requires pausing monitoring, leaving data exposed. Other vendors on the market can ingest and analyze data in real time and may provide more reliable DLP solutions as a result. 

Learn more about Nightfall AI for collaboration security and compliance 

Theta Lake Alternative: Smarsh

Smarsh is an archiving and compliance provider focused on financial services and government sectors. Smarsh secures data from multiple sources, including collaboration tools, email, and social media, into a searchable archive that supports eDiscovery and security workflows. 

While reviewers appreciate the ability to ingest data from dozens of different sources, some note that Smarsh’s archive, while capable of supporting workflows for different departments, is not architected in a way that makes the data readily available. Others mention “constant downtime” and hidden costs, especially for organizations that want to download their data from Smarsh at the end of their contract. 

Final thoughts

When considering Theta Lake alternatives for security and compliance, it’s important to ask several key questions: 

• Does the solution ingest data in real time, or are there gaps in the archive? 
• How does the vendor search data (regex/keyword or NLP) and what measures are taken to reduce false positives and fatigue alert? 

• What kind of delay exists between a policy violation occurring and the solution flagging it for action? 
• Can the solution integrate with existing workflows, or does it create complexity and require additional IT lift? 
• Is the product scalable with enterprise-volume data or can it only handle information in small batches? 
• What kind of learning curve is required to use the solution effectively? 

By considering each archiving and compliance platform in relation to your specific requirements and being proactive about understanding how your data is ingested, stored, and analyzed, security and compliance teams can make an informed decision about the right software to meet their needs.