Smarsh completes merger with Actiance, launches Connected Suite offering - SmartBrief

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Smarsh completes merger with Actiance, launches Connected Suite offering

Smarsh launches new electronic communications retention solution to help companies with communications capture, archiving, supervision, e-discovery and control.

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Smarsh, which has now completed its merger with Actiance, is launching its Connected Suite electronic communications retention solution to help companies with communications capture, archiving, supervision, e-discovery and control.

Connected Suite leverages the now combined technologies of Actiance and Smarsh to capture data across 80-plus channels of electronic communication, including collaboration platforms such as Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams and Cisco’s WebEx Teams.

 “As business becomes more social, mobile and collaborative, companies are trying to keep pace with changing customer preferences and to solve their regulatory compliance challenges,” said Smarsh CEO Brian Cramer. “With the Smarsh Connected Suite, organizations can choose how they respond to the changing dynamics of their customers and employees, enable their business to maximize the power of the communications channels of today and tomorrow, and proactively manage the associated risk to better protect their organization.”

Smarsh has long been a leader when it comes to compliance solutions for the financial services sector and it also has a major market presence in the government space. Finance professionals need to be able to quickly produce communications records at the request of regulators, while government agencies often must do the same for the sake of transparency or to satisfy Freedom of Information Act and other public records requests. In the government sector, Smarsh has a partnership with NextRequest to help state and local agencies across the US better manage their records.

“Much of our government business is focused on mobile text messaging and social media,” explains Ken Anderson, VP of Marketing and Communications for Smarsh. “The real drivers are eDiscovery and the Freedom of Information Act. Public records are obviously open to constituents, so being able to pull that content and make it available quickly and easily is important for government agencies.”

As more and more communications platforms come online, Smarsh works directly with the platforms and mobile carriers to help organizations capture more and more forms of data. “Connected Suite allows us to zero in on the platforms of today and take them into tomorrow,” says Anderson.

The Connected Suite solution consists of three main pieces: Connected Capture, Connected Archive and Connected Apps. All the specs are available on the Smarsh website, but the functionality that might be most appealing to compliance professionals (and all executives who have skin in the game when it comes to their organization’s reputational capital) is an aspect of the Connected Apps functionality called Control App.

Control App allows organizations to set specific parameters for certain communication platforms and monitor employee-generated messages that might put them at legal, ethical or reputational risk. The app alerts the compliance team in real-time when a suspect message has been created and allows them to prevent the message from being sent. The app can also automatically block certain kinds of messages from being sent. Such capabilities are critical for companies and government agencies hoping to avoid the negative headlines – and legal exposure – that can be generated by electronic messages they wish were never sent.

Across all industries, the need to capture and archive electronic messages is growing at a rapid pace. That growth isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon, so Cramer believes offerings like Connected Suite mean Smarsh is well-positioned to meet that need.

“Large enterprises have reached a tipping point with legacy archiving technologies,” Cramer explains. “With our modern and extensible technology stack that can scale with today’s data volumes, we are uniquely positioned to help customers accelerate their roadmaps to cloud adoption and migrate data from legacy systems quickly and easily.”