Osterman Research Report Offers Best Practices for Archiving and Securing Social Media and Collaboration Platforms

NEW YORK, Dec. 11, 2017 -- Archive360, the world’s leading provider of data migration and management solutions, today announced IT research and consulting firm Osterman Research has published a new report entitled, “Best Practices for Archiving and Securing Social Media and Collaboration Platforms.” The report outlines the staggering penetration and growth in use of social media and cloud collaboration platforms in business environments. The report goes on to discuss that while there are numerous and irreplaceable benefits to leveraging social media and cloud collaboration platforms for business purposes, there are also inherent risks that, if not managed properly, leave organizations vulnerable to business and legal risk, as well as regulations non-compliance. The report concludes with the Best Practices that business, legal, compliance and IT professionals can put into practice today to eliminate these risks.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• Social media use, both approved and unapproved, is growing at a healthy pace in most organizations.
• The vast majority of organizations have well-established policies in place for corporate email, but these types of policies are much less common for tools like consumer-focused social media, collaboration systems, unified communications systems and other social platforms.
• A large number of organizations have experienced a malware infection through a social media channel, most commonly through Facebook.
• Non-enterprise social media tools are unlikely to secure and protect account access and content to degree necessary to satisfy corporate security policies.
• Most organizations do not retain social media content from non-enterprise accounts, and fewer than three in five do so for social media content from enterprise accounts. Neither is content from collaboration systems retained to the same degree as more commonly used tools like collaboration solutions.
• While true archiving is quite common for corporate systems like email and file shares, it is less common for social media, text messages and other types of content, despite that these solutions often contain important business information.
• There are a number of important best practices that any organization should consider and implement in the context of proper social media management. These include understanding why social media and collaboration tools are used, development of detailed and thorough policies, monitoring and managing employee use of these tools, archiving business content from them, and deploying enterprise-grade alternatives where possible.

“It should come as no surprise that the use of social media and cloud collaboration platforms are proliferating virtually every business environment, and for good reason.  The ability to freely communicate, access and share information is invaluable and critical to success in today’s digital economy.  However, for many organizations – whether public, private or government, the inability to effectively monitor, manage, capture, store and protect all data and communications puts it at serious business, legal and/or regulatory compliance risk,” said Michael Osterman, Principal Analyst and Founder, Osterman Research. “As outlined in my recent research and the resulting report, there are however steps that any IT, business, legal and/or regulations professional can take in order to protect their organization (and their careers).  I would suggest that the right amount of preparation now, will save a great deal of time, expense and headaches later.”

To read, “Best Practices for Archiving and Securing Social Media and Collaboration Platforms” please visit: http://bit.ly/2jLSqJp.

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About Report Sponsor, Archive360:
Archive360 is the world’s leading provider of data migration and management solutions for the Microsoft cloud.  Since 2012, Archive360 has securely migrated data into the Microsoft cloud with record-breaking speed, verifiable data fidelity and legally defensible chain of custody. Archive360’s Archive2Azure^TM solution is the compliance and unstructured data storage and management solution based on the Microsoft Azure platform. Archive360 is a global organization that delivers its solutions both directly and through a worldwide network of partners. Archive360 is a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider and the Archive2Azure^TM solution is Microsoft Azure Certified. To learn more, please visit: www.archive360.com.

Copyright ©2017. Archive360 is a registered trademark and Archive2Anywhere, Archive2Azure and FastCollect are trademarks of Archive360, Inc. 

PR Contacts:

Nicole Gorman
The Ventana Group, for Archive360
(508) 397-0131
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Sabrina Sanchez                                                                                           
The Ventana Group, for Archive360                                       
(925) 785-3014                                                         
[email protected]