White Paper: Achieving Regulatory Compliance with FaceTime IMAuditor^™

Abstract

Instant messaging (IM) has experienced tremendous growth, becoming the fastest growing communications medium in the history of communications. Industry analyst firm Meta Group anticipates that IM users in the enterprise will increase from 12 million users in 2002 to 95 million users by 2007. This increased use of IM within the enterprise is causing compliance and technology management challenges for Compliance Officers, Security Officers, and Information (IT) professionals within large organizations, especially those subject to government regulations. Firms in Financial Services, Healthcare, and other industries must comply with detailed regulations that require all correspondence - including electronic communications - between employees and clients to be captured and stored for auditing purposes. Rules such as SEC 17a-3 and 17a-4, NASD 3010 and 3011, and HIPAA define these regulations. While other methods of communication are governed by IT policies, IM historically was not. However, with the increased use of IM for critical real-time business communications, Compliance Officers, Security Officers, and IT professionals can no longer disregard the use of IM within the enterprise. Some organizations have taken radical steps to limit or abolish the use of IM, however there is a better solution. The FaceTime IMAuditor™ is the industry standard award winning solution used by over 50% of the world's leading financial services firms as well as a number of large healthcare insurance providers, energy traders, and others to manage, control, and regulate the use if instant messaging. Without impacting the end-user experience, IMAuditor captures, stores, monitors, and retrieves all of a company's instant messages, sent and received, for a wide variety of public, enterprise, and professional community IM networks.

Explosive Growth of Instant Messaging

Business has always been about time-sensitivity and speed in communications, getting the right information to the right people at the right time, to be able to make the right decisions. Innovations in computing and communication technologies have been largely responsible for doing business faster, and better. Instant Messaging (IM) is a powerful communication technology that is breaking the barriers of cost while increasing employee productivity and information sharing.

IM is everywhere - on desktops, PDAs, cell phones, pagers, etc. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the rapid consumer adoption of IM networks makes IM the fastest growing communication channel in history. In 2001, the public IM networks, AOL, Microsoft MSN and Yahoo! accounted for over 100 million users, growing to 400 million users by 2004. Gartner Group predicts that by 2004, 60% of real-time communication between users by any means, including voice, text or call-and-response will be driven by IM. Meta Group predicts that the number of IM users in North American businesses will grow from 12 million in 2002 to 95 million in 2007.

The motivation for adoption of IM in business is the need to communicate and multi-task in real-time. Business users have discovered the value of instant messaging - they are having virtual conferences, collaborating on projects, augmenting phone conversations, and exchanging transaction instructions. Other benefits of IM include community building and collaboration among multiple corporate locations, remote employees, telecommuters, vendors and customers, cost savings from reduced telephony costs, better accuracy of transactions via written communications, and more efficient markets by communicating in real-time.

IM growth in business is occurring in multiple dimensions. The vast majority of businesses use the public IM networks (PIM), such as AOL's AIM, Microsoft's MSN .Net Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger, often in conjunction with enterprise IM servers (EIM), such as IBM/Lotus SameTime, Jabber, and Microsoft Office Live Communication Server (LCS). EIMs are on-premise servers that act as local exchanges for instant messaging. In addition, industry specific IM communities are rapidly gaining popularity. For example, Reuters Messaging, Instant Bloomberg, and Communicator are growing in finance. Indeed, the IM use in corporations is heterogeneous: different public and community network and enterprise server protocols are utilized with diverse clients from various vendors accessing them.