When two major advertising groups last year proposed a merger, it would have meant the same ad agency serving both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. To keep the ideas and content from being shared, the ad agency would have had to create ‘Ethical Walls’ or communication blocks between the creative teams serving each client.
Ethical Walls are a physical or electronic barrier designed to separate groups from communicating – for ethical, compliance, or privacy reasons. They are used frequently by law firms when they represent opposing clients or when one lawyer’s background puts him or her at odds with a current case. After the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, financial services service firms put up walls between sell-side analysts, who publicly recommend stocks, and buy-side analysts, who buy stocks for mutual funds, in order to avoid conflicts of interest and possible investigation by the SEC for insider trading. Some schools also use Ethical Walls to separate certain types of communications between students and administrators.
But even companies outside these industries may have a need to set up communication walls between different groups or individuals.
If you are using Microsoft infrastructure for your communications and collaboration, there are built in tools which will set up communication blocks in Exchange and SharePoint. In Exchange, this is handled with transport rules, and in SharePoint, through site permissions.
Lync server, however, is limited in this area, which is why we built communication controls into our newest version of IM Security for Microsoft Lync. IM Security installs on top of Lync servers and enables you to set up permanent or temporary blocks between individuals or groups. You can choose which communication features are allowed such as chat, video, or file transfers.
IM Security supports Lync 2013 and also scans file transfers for malware, blocks malicious URLs shared in messages, and uses content filtering and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to scan for risky content and sensitive data. Watch a 2 minute demo of IM Security or try it free for 30 days.
