Data integrity refers to the accuracy and consistency (validity) of data over its lifecycle. Maintaining data integrity should be a core focus for all organisations, particularly with call recordings; compromised data can not be used and they may result in significant costs if they are needed for regulatory compliance.
Call recording data is no different. Its integrity can be compromised in a number of ways; from data replication, updates, transfers or even simply being accessed by staff. There are two important considerations that need to be taken into account to ensure data integrity:
- Ensuring integrity and storage of call recordings from live recorders
- The availability and integrity of recorded audio assets after the recorder’s end of life
Ensuring safety and integrity for your call recordings
- Recorder Access Call recordings can contain sensitive business information. The right level of access needs to be decided and provided to members of staff, so to ensure the call cannot be tampered with and integrity lost. Some users should only have the ability to replay their own calls, whilst others, such as managers, should have access to their entire team’s call data.
Moreover, Audit trails should also be used to see who has accessed, replayed or downloaded a call recording; information which can become extremely valuable if any discrepancies were to arise.
- Encryption Encryption of the audio and metadata of call recordings will prevent misuse of confidential information. Encryption guarantees that in the unlikely event recording servers are stolen or compromised, it will not be possible to decode the archived calls without knowing the passphrases. This is extremely important when storing sensitive information, such as customer card details.
- Backups Ensure you are regularly backing up your database and recorder configuration. In case of recorder failure, these could be needed to restore the solution to a working state. Backups should be stored in a secure location and made available for system restoration when/if required.
- Resilience Does the recording solution have any built in resilience? This could include:
- Redundant power supplies
- Redundant recorders – these will assume the recording role in the event of master recorder failure
- Hard Disk resiliency – In the event of hard disk failure, is there any resiliency built into the disk array (i.e. RAID)
Availability and integrity for your recorded assets
- Accessing recordings from different systems after they have reached EOL If your recording solution is reaching End of Life, what safeguards do you have in place to ensure that the audio can still be accessed even if the manufacturer will no longer support the solution?
When your system reaches end of life, upgrading or migrating to a newer system does not guarantee the integrity and availability of the old recordings. The extraction and conversion of the files and databases to different formats and structures not only risk corrupting the files, but could also increase their size fivefold.
As a standalone virtualised portal, Wordwatch is able to access, export and replay all the legacy audio files with their metadata from different voice recording systems, regardless of location, manufacturer, age or file format.
- Audio Storage Is the audio currently archived on tape or DVD? If so, where is this audio stored? If audio is stored on tape, you need to consider tape degradation and look at archiving tape audio on to spinning disk or the cloud instead. Also, if the audio is currently archived on to a NAS (network storage), how is access being maintained once your system reaches EOL? And if it’s archived by WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage, does this maintain the access control over your archived audio?
These are all important points to keep in mind to maintain your data integrity over time.
Wordwatch allows you to decommission your aging voice recorders and migrate the legacy files from its NAS servers to its ITaaS partner, intact, without changing their format or metadata. The solution allows you to integrate and convert your legacy database with your new one without tampering with the original recording, thus eliminating the risk element with the integrity of the legacy recordings.
