Avoid Needless Exposure and Get your IM in Compliance

Compliance breaches can be very costly to an enterprise. With regulations being regularly revisited and created, it is important to ensure that enterprise instant messaging (IM) systems meet the requirements. In July, 2008 ProcessOne, an instant messaging supplier, issued their “2008 Enterprise IT Decision Makers Survey,” which showed that ten percent of UK IT directors did not know they had to keep audit trails of IM conversations and eight percent knew but did not keep them because they felt it was too complicated. IT must realize that if the enterprise cannot meet necessary compliance requirements, it is better to ban IM than to fail audits or face lawsuits.