What You Need to Know About Zoom’s Archiving Solution

With employees and clients alike opting for virtual communication, organizations with specific compliance requirements, like financial services institutions, can’t always rely on a paper trail to help regulated workers manage information. 

Regulated users — Zoom users in financial services institutions who are subject to regulatory oversight, including from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) — need to be equipped with technology designed to support compliance requirements as well as frictionless communication and collaboration. That’s where our archiving solution comes into play. 

Zoom’s archiving solution allows account administrators to set up an automated mechanism to collect and archive meeting or webinar data to a third-party platform of their choice. This helps financial institutions satisfy various regulations and other compliance requirements. Once archiving is set up by account admins, it will be present when regulated meeting hosts or users start or join a meeting. To indicate that the meeting is being archived, different types of indicators are present — all of which you can learn more about in our white paper.

Unlike cloud recording, which saves video, audio, chat, and transcription files to the Zoom cloud, our archiving application programming interface (API) — a connection between software programs — collects the meeting and webinar data or metadata necessary to meet certain compliance guidelines. It can also collect audio, video, and chat communication if specified by account administrators. The information collected during a meeting or webinar depends on how the admin has configured the solution, but it can include the following data sets:

• Meeting metadata (required): This includes the meeting title, date, time zone, meeting duration, host ID, meeting ID, universal unique identifier (UUID), and passcode.
  • The meeting ID and UUID can be used to retrieve additional information related to the meeting, such as Polls, Q&A, and satisfaction surveys.
• In-meeting chat messages (public and direct): This includes user display names, email addresses (excluding guests), message strings, and timestamps in a TXT format. The chat would be tagged to differentiate public versus private chat. Note: Apart from this information, meeting reactions and deleted messages can be captured with in-meeting chat messages in a JSON format. This can be enabled by contacting Zoom support.
• Audio: An audio-only M4A file, which includes ​​external as well as internal meeting audio recordings.
• Video: An audio and video MP4 file, which includes screen shares, whiteboards, and annotation.
• Captions and transcripts: A video text track (VTT) file including closed captioning and audio transcripts from a meeting.

As a unified communications platform, Zoom strives to enable compliance across the channels our customers need for their day-to-day work. While archiving is most commonly used for Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars, certain aspects of Zoom Phone and Zoom Team Chat can be captured or archived, which can be set up by account administrators: 

Zoom Phone: Account admins can capture voice calls, voicemail, and SMS messages occurring via Zoom Phone. 

Zoom Team Chat: Account admins can capture sent, edited, and deleted messages and files sent via Zoom Team Chat.

From Theta Lake to Smarsh to Global Relay, we work with leading archiving vendors that enable archiving for Zoom solutions. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how we work together:

1. Account administrators download and install their choice of archiving application from the Zoom App Marketplace.
2. Once account admins configure their preferred account-level settings, Zoom’s archiving agent joins meetings or webinars and collects information accordingly, informing users of the action via notifications during the process. 
3. After the meeting ends, archived files are stored within Zoom’s cloud storage for a defined number of days. This number can be configured in account settings and ranges between 1-30 days.
4. When these archived files are present in Zoom’s cloud storage, third-party partners or developers, like Theta Lake or Smarsh, can choose to receive a notification whenever the files for their account’s meetings or webinars are available to download.
5. After that, the third-party application can leverage Zoom’s archiving APIs to fetch the files that have been archived for a particular account.
6. The third-party app then processes and manages this information consistent with how the account administrator has configured the solution.

With our archiving solution, Zoom strives to enable frictionless collaboration while having guardrails in place to help manage risk. These guardrails are designed to offer the support financial services organizations need as they face a complex regulatory landscape and navigate a new digital era. 

When equipped with the right tools, these businesses can keep pace with the new digital imperative and future-proof operations for any changes still ahead. The end result: efficient work, accurate information, and seamless digital experiences across the financial services industry.

To learn more about Zoom’s meeting and webinar archiving offering, explore our white paper. And for further information on archiving for Zoom Team Chat, check out this support article.