IT chiefs were have been warned to prepare for the possibility of new corporate governance rules that would require them to keep records of voice-over-IP (VoIP) conversations alongside email, instant messaging and other forms of communication.

Speaking at the Symantec user event in San Francisco last week, Jeremy Burton, a senior vice-president at the security specialist, said, “Financial institutions in the US already need to keep voicemail because it is stored on disk. As soon as the regulators figure out that VoIP is a digital stream, they will probably try to force that to be kept as well.”

Calls would have to be stored in their original audio format, rather than being automatically compressed and indexed using speech-to-text tools, according to Burton, because otherwise lawyers could argue that the original content had been altered. He added that any VoIP archiving legislation is at least two to three years away, but the prospect still alarmed IT managers already struggling to meet existing compliance requirements and manage rapidly expanding data volumes.

Chris Kadwill, ICT manager at Luton Borough Council, said he is resigned to rules demanding VoIP archiving in future. “We have a call centre employing 70 agents that handles over 300,000 telephone calls a year. If we have to record and store all of those, we are talking about many extra terabytes of data,” he added.

Legal experts foresaw other challenges. “There would be an obstacle in recording telephone conversations as that’s unlawful unless certain conditions are met,” said Mike Conradi, head of technology practice at law firm Stephenson Harwood.

Conradi added that he had not yet heard of proposals to change UK regulations to encompass VoIP records.

George Gardiner of IT law practice Gardiner & Co argued that VoIP archiving rules might not prove as onerous as feared. “I don’t think the regulators are expecting you to put in million-dollar systems or voice transcripts. At most they want something that says, ‘This number called this number at this time on this day and here’s the WAV file,’” he predicted.