Author – The Vaporstream Team

As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile and employees rely on texting for quick, easy communication, organizations across industries have been driven to create policies that guide how the information created by mobile text messaging is managed. These frameworks help to effectively support recordkeeping, answer compliance needs and ensure data availability for eDiscovery. Information governance is one such accepted discipline, ensuring a reasonable level of security for records and information that require protection.

In order to have effective information governance for mobile messaging, businesses need to reference an accountability framework to define what elements of information management are most important to them. There are various frameworks available today, but the ARMA International Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles (the Principles) is the “standard” that businesses follow.

There are eight principles in total that businesses need to evaluate: accountability, integrity, transparency, protection, compliance, availability, retention and disposition. As an example, availability is often a huge priority, and the biggest hurdle, for businesses when it comes to information and a huge concern when considering mobile messaging and mobility. You must consider who needs access to information – internal colleagues, external parties or both. How can you ensure the right people have access and that information is not shared with the wrong recipients?

Once a business has outlined priorities for its information governance program, executives should then enact guidelines that align. Such as, do not use unsecure /native chat and text for business purposes; and how do you make information available only to the right people.

To meet these objectives, the organization needs to leverage a secure enterprise messaging app (such as Vaporstream). These apps offer the ease of use of consumer-based apps, however provide the security features that guarantee text conversations, including documents and images sent via text, are seen only by the intended recipient.

To learn more about how secure enterprise messaging apps enable businesses to enforce information governance for mobile messaging, check out this full article on the topic from our CEO, Galina Datskovsky in Corporate Compliance Insights.