Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Staying Ahead of the Data Compliance Landscape

By Ajay Bhatia, GM, Digital Compliance at Veritas Technologies

Over the past year, the acceleration in digital transformation initiatives, combined with the continuation of hybrid working trends has caused a massive uptick in the amount of data being generated from an increasingly diverse range of sources. As workforces become even more distributed in the new year, and as data privacy laws and regulations continue to evolve at the national and state level, compliance requirements in the business world will continue to increase in complexity. So, what can businesses do to ensure they are able to effectively capture, archive, monitor and discover this rapidly growing volume of data as we look ahead to the new year? Here are my top key themes for staying ahead of the data compliance landscape in 2022.

1.       Businesses will need to unify data privacy, risk and discovery to avoid fines

In 2022, two business challenges will collide and require organizations to unify their compliance strategies. Firstly, digital transformation and the shift to hybrid work has fractured data across an increasingly diverse range of messaging and collaboration tools. Secondly, as privacy regulations continue to evolve from country to country and from state to state, it is becoming even more challenging to stay on top of compliance. The plethora of data management, privacy and compliance solutions that many businesses have adopted in order to stay compliant and capture, archive and discover all their data is quickly getting out of hand. In 2022, these two challenges will come to a head, as organizations realize that they don't have the resources to keep expanding - and manage - their bench of tools but can't afford to fall out of compliance either. This will start to drive a shift to a more unified approach, where businesses will be able to manage data archiving, privacy, risk and discovery from a single unified and integrated platform - leading to simplified management and increased efficiency.

2.       Lines between business and personal communications will continue to blur - and businesses will need to take action

The use of personal or non-official channels for business purposes is an issue that almost every organization will face in the new year. This is largely because the shift to a "work from anywhere" culture is driving up the volume of on-the-go conversations over text, phone, video, social platforms, or chat, with workers dipping in and out of different tools to speak to different contacts. For instance, with face-to-face interaction minimized during COVID, it's much more likely that a broker might first meet a customer online, for example through Clubhouse, and then, once signed, it's only natural for them to continue their correspondence there. But, what is driven by convenience for knowledge workers causes complexity for the compliance team, because if those conversations relate to the business, they must be captured and monitored. Going into 2022, organizations will need to proactively adapt their policies to make sure that, if a social or collaboration tool is being used in the course of business, it's included in their compliance strategy.

3.       AI algorithms will enable a shift to preventative monitoring

AI/ML offers businesses the opportunity to oversee regulated information at a scale that was never possible before - without needing to expand their compliance teams. The additional monitoring capacity that bots will be able to provide in 2022 will enable businesses to move from a reactive posture, where they open investigations based on suspicions of compliance breaches, to a proactive approach, where sampling of data can be done on a big enough scale to preemptively spot potential issues before they're reported. This will not only allow organizations to minimize the impact of non-compliance by stopping it early on, but also to avoid the negative publicity that could potentially follow a formal inquiry.

4.       Data analysis will shift to multi-modal communications

Information created by the shift to collaboration tools during the pandemic will hit critical mass for data mining in 2022. Veritas research found that the amount of time employees spent on collaboration, conferencing and messaging tools has increased by 20% since the start of the pandemic. The good news is that these tools capture data that is normally lost during in-person meetings, and the body of information that businesses now have on record is getting big enough to paint a meaningful, holistic picture. For example, in the healthcare industry, communications between a doctor and a patient across written patient notes, audio calls and video consultations can be captured and analyzed to extract the sentiment of written words and even facial expressions or tone of voice. This can be compiled together to help build up a more holistic picture to assist with diagnosis, before being archived for HIPPA or other regulatory purposes.

5.       Predicting intelligent information will gain momentum

As we know, the shift to hybrid work has caused a massive increased in the amount of data being generated across numerous sources, and it is essential for today's businesses to be able to capture, archive, and discover this rapidly growing volume of data. However, this process can be quite expensive based on the amount of data being generated and, the problem is, a lot of this data is classified as ‘dark data' - meaning information that is collected, processed and stored, but isn't used for any other purposes.

In the new year, organizations will start proactively predicting intelligent content right at the edge to get a better sense of what data really matters. In doing so, technology can leverage a combination of AI data patterns and policies to make an intelligent prediction of what content actually needs to be captured and analyzed, which in turn, will significantly lower costs and improve efficiencies. This is the next wave of managing not just data, but information, at its source.

6.       COVID leniency will lift - so businesses need to be prepared

Many compliance watchdogs made a play of showing leniency during the COVID pandemic with regulators recognizing that businesses frequently had neither the bandwidth to match compliance to their emergency COVID activities, nor the funds to pay their fines. As we approach the second anniversary of living with COVID, we can expect that tolerance to start to dry up as the international regulators begin to feel that the time for excuses has passed. Organizations that have needed to focus their attentions elsewhere should make a point of catching up quickly before the fines start to roll in.

By keeping these top trends in mind, any business, especially those in highly regulated industries can rest assured they are prepared to tackle the most critical compliance-related challenges in 2022.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ajay Bhatia is GM for Veritas' Digital Compliance (DC) portfolio, where he leads the product strategy, roadmap, customer experience and business management for the comprehensive DC portfolio.

Ajay has more than 20 years of strategy, business operations and product leadership experience in the domains of enterprise and cloud storage across global markets. He joined Veritas from Seagate, where he was general manager of the company's Global Flash business, responsible for SSD and Flash products across the device and systems business units.

Ajay holds an MBA from Santa Clara University, CA and an MS in Chemical Engineering from University of Southern California, CA. He is also a CFA Level III candidate.