“Make yourself redundant.”

You often hear CEOs use this as a business mantra. It makes sense. A company’s employees and executive team should be empowered to work independently while pulling in the same direction and toward the same goal. Building the structures and culture for this to happen, with or without you, is what business leaders should be aiming for.

Making your industry redundant is a goal you don’t hear from CEOs quite as often. But it is equally important; pushing your team to drive innovation so far past the status quo that it changes the expectations customers set for your entire industry. This is the only way businesses can keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

Smarsh is the recognized leader in the Enterprise Information Archiving industry. We have worked hard over the past 20 years to be a disrupting force that pushes ourselves and our peers to continuously innovate.

Despite this, it is understandably terrifying to admit that the archive, as we knew it, is dead.

The COVID-19 pandemic is partially to blame. Since 2020, our concept of working has been turned on its head. Entire workforces now operate remotely, collaboration tools abound, and the lines between personal and professional communications have blurred. These factors have completely changed what businesses need and expect from their archives.

Of course, times have been changing since long before the pandemic. The way we communicate has been evolving at an ever-faster pace since Smarsh was founded in the early 2000s. Back then, we were helping clients capture, archive and monitor emails to meet rapidly modernizing regulatory requirements.

Now, we help our clients capture, archive and monitor data from over 80 different channels (and growing). Our solutions need to be able to understand and discover risk in text, audio, video, photos, emojis, reactions, instant messages and social media posts. And the fact that this needs to be done seamlessly both in the office and at home only adds to the complexity.

The legacy archives that many of the world’s largest financial services businesses still use weren’t created to manage this. And so, Smarsh is once again pushing to innovate to meet the needs of our clients and define the standards our industry will be held to in the future.