Our unified communications and collaboration platform is designed to further simplify your work. But more and more organizations are faced with rapidly changing regulatory compliance challenges that they still struggle to control.
According to recent Metrigy studyMany organizations are reacting in ways that may actually increase their risk.
Nearly 30% of companies surveyed said they block access to new applications or features to address compliance issues. This may seem cautious, but studies show it often leads to worse outcomes.
For UC leaders, the challenge is no longer whether compliance is important, but how to meet increasing regulatory requirements without compromising the business value of collaboration, productivity, and modern communications.
When compliance comes too late
One of the most common mistakes organizations make is viewing compliance as a sub-problem. UC platforms are selected, deployed, and widely adopted before oversight, recordkeeping, and retention requirements are fully considered. Once the time difference is identified, your choices are limited.
“What we often see is that people don’t think about compliance, oversight and record-keeping early on when choosing and implementing a UC solution,” he said. Tim Ward, Product Marketing Specialist at Global Relay.
“Later, when these issues are identified, the number of options starts to diminish very quickly.”
Metrigy’s research highlights how complex UC compliance has become.
Now, requirements have expanded beyond simple archiving to include retention and destruction policies, eDiscovery preparation, data classification, privacy controls, and voice compliance. This applies not only to calls and messages, but also meeting transcripts, summaries, files, shared documents, and AI-generated content.
When these considerations are added post-deployment, organizations often need to limit features, delay rollouts, or exclude certain user groups. In highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and energy, these trade-offs can directly impact how effectively employees serve customers and partners.
Why blocking rarely reduces risk
“The problem is that many of the things companies block are the most useful components of the solution,” Ward explained, citing meeting recordings, transcripts and collaboration tools.
“Blocking too many features will increase the temptation for employees to find alternatives on their own.”
That temptation proved costly. Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, MetrigyIt noted repeated enforcement actions related to out-of-channel communications.
In the United States alone, regulators have issued fines totaling hundreds of millions of dollars after employees used unauthorized apps like WhatsApp and Signal to conduct business conversations.
“This all happened using unauthorized applications, so there was absolutely no record keeping, no capture, no archiving,” Lazar said.
“We’ve seen at least half a dozen cases of this scenario being played out over the last five to seven years.”
The data backs this up. Nearly 63% of organizations allow employees to use consumer messaging apps, and nearly two-thirds of them actively monitor usage. These numbers reflect the reality many leaders recognize. This means that blanket bans are difficult to enforce when employees are under time pressure or working across organizational boundaries.
AI is expanding the compliance surface area.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating UC compliance challenges at a rate many organizations never anticipated.
AI-powered transcription, summarization, content creation, translation, and agent workflows are now built directly into collaboration platforms to generate massive amounts of regulated content.
“One of the biggest areas of interest we’re seeing is how companies capture AI-generated output,” Lazar said. “This includes meeting notes, message summaries, documents, and even presentations and graphics.”
As AI-generated content expands, accuracy, classification, and preservation become more complex. Defective records or misclassified summaries can create compliance risks just as easily as missing records.
Metrigy’s research also highlights growing concerns about data breaches and privacy gaps as AI tools gain access to a wider range of enterprise data.
Voice compliance is also evolving at the same time. While voice remains a critical business channel (68.3% of Metrigy respondents say voice will remain essential), AI-based surveillance is changing the way organizations monitor.
Advanced tools can analyze higher volumes of voice communications and reduce false positives, but only if organizations invest in the right infrastructure.
The real cost of non-compliance
Non-compliance poses both regulatory and business risks. Regulatory penalties may include fines, civil judgments, and restrictions on operating in certain markets. In extreme cases, an organization may completely lose its ability to operate.
Financial services companies face the most prominent enforcement actions, but global regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX expand exposure across industries and geographies.
Business risks are often less visible but just as damaging. Data breaches, reputational damage, loss of customer trust, and diminished employee trust can all result from weak compliance practices. For publicly traded companies, even a single incident can impact stock prices and investor confidence. Metrigy notes that organizations with a poor data protection reputation often have difficulty attracting partners and retaining talent.
At the same time, there is significant untapped value in data collected for compliance purposes. “We’re collecting all this data from different conversation channels,” Lazar said.
“We can potentially use this to understand what’s going on in an organization.”
When analyzed responsibly, compliance data can surface customer issues, workflow bottlenecks, and new risks before they escalate. The difference between high-performing organizations and the rest is how they use that data strategically.
What High-ROI Organizations Do Differently
Metrigy’s research shows that organizations that achieve above-average ROI from their UC investments view compliance as a foundational competency. These “Success Group” companies involve security, compliance, and risk teams in the early stages of application evaluation and purchase. Metrigy’s Optimize Employee Engagement: 2025 study found that 66.7% of high-ROI organizations included these teams in their app selection.
We also perform regular audits and use a centralized, third-party compliance platform rather than fragmented, app-specific solutions. “Multi-vendor environments typically require a centralized repository and capture platform,” Lazar said. “This allows us to apply consistent policies across all applications.”
This approach reduces complexity by enabling a unified view across voice, messaging, conferencing, and approved consumer apps, while allowing organizations to adopt new tools without reopening the same compliance debates.
Stay compliant without slowing down your business
As AI and new ways of collaborating reshape the way work gets done, UC compliance challenges are becoming more pressing. The organizations that succeed will be those that stop seeing compliance as a hindrance and start treating it as an enabler.
By engaging compliance teams early, supporting rather than prohibiting new channels, and investing in a scalable compliance platform, companies can reduce risk while remaining productive.
As Ward summarizes, compliance is ultimately about balance. It’s about giving employees the tools they need to do their jobs while meeting recordkeeping and oversight obligations.