Compliance regulations: What your business needs to know

Keeping up with compliance regulations is genuinely hard. Just when you feel like you have a handle on what your business needs to do, something shifts. A new state law kicks in. An existing regulation gets updated. The rules your legal counsel signed off on last year need a second look.

For businesses operating across multiple industries or geographies, that challenge is even more pronounced. There is no single compliance rulebook. There are many, and they don't always align.

So, with all of that to consider, where do you start? A good place is with your own industry, because that is usually where the most specific and enforceable obligations tend to live. 

Industry regulations are your guidepost

The compliance requirements your business faces depend heavily on the kind of work you do (aka your industry) and the data you handle.

Healthcare organizations in the US operate under HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA compliance sets strict standards for how patient data is protected, retained, and produced on demand. And its reach extends beyond hospitals and clinics to any business associate that touches protected health information. As you can imagine, this includes a wide range of vendors, technology providers, and service firms.

Financial services firms work under a different set of frameworks. FINRA and SEC rules require broker-dealers and related entities to retain electronic communications, including email, for up to six years. Then there's SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), which imposes additional records management requirements on publicly traded companies. Across all of them, failing to produce the right records during an audit or investigation carries financial consequences.

There also is a broader data privacy layer. GDPR covers any organization that handles personal data belonging to EU residents, regardless of where that organization is headquartered. CCPA and similar US state laws govern how customer data is collected, stored, and shared. These are broad-based industry regulations, and many businesses find themselves subject to several types of compliance frameworks at once.

That is already a lot to keep track of, and none of it stands still. HIPAA has been updated multiple times since it was enacted, and GDPR enforcement priorities shift as regulators mature. Likewise, FINRA and SEC rules evolve as communication channels do. The compliance landscape your team mapped out two years ago may look different today, which means that staying current is an ongoing effort.

Geography adds regulatory compliance risk

Where you operate matters as much as what industry you’re in. In Europe, GDPR provides a unified framework, but unified does not mean simple. Each EU member state has its own data protection authority with its own enforcement priorities. Germany's GoBD, for example, adds specific requirements for business communication retention while France's CNIL maintains its own active enforcement agenda. The reality is that meeting the letter of GDPR is a starting point, not a finish line.

In the US, the data privacy picture is a patchwork. There is no comprehensive federal law, so states have stepped in. As of 2026, 20 states have enacted comprehensive privacy laws, and three new statutes took effect on January 1, 2026. Existing laws also keep evolving: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon, and Utah all updated laws this year with tighter provisions.

What this means practically is that a business headquartered in one state, serving customers in several others, may be simultaneously operating under multiple overlapping compliance frameworks. Each carries its own data retention requirements, its own consumer rights provisions, and its own enforcement authority.

Then there's the litigation piece, which is a uniquely American complication, as the US is notably more litigious than its peers. When records management failures come to light, civil litigation from impacted individuals often follows, and the two tend to land at the same time. 

The real cost of regulatory oversight

The cost of non-compliance is worth examining too, because the numbers have a way of focusing our attention.

GDPR fines across Europe surpassed €5.88 billion in cumulative total by early 2025 with enforcement now spanning financial services, healthcare, and retail. This is well beyond the early focus on large technology companies. Under GDPR, penalties can reach up to 4% of a company's annual global revenue.

HIPAA enforcement shows no signs of slowing down: in the first five months of 2025, the OCR announced 10 new resolution agreements for HIPAA violations with fines that ranged from $25,000 to $3 million per incident. And by the end of 2025, the OCR closed 21 settlements and civil monetary penalties, making it the second-highest annual enforcement total on record.

Beyond financial exposure, there are corrective action plans, legal fees, and the kind of public scrutiny that erodes customer trust in ways that are hard to quantify and harder to recover from. 

Email archiving requirements for your data

Understanding regulations is one thing. Knowing what is required from your data is where it’s easy to get lost. Compliance regulations don’t simply say, protect your data. It’s expected that you retain it for a specific period, store it in a tamper-proof state, and produce it on demand when a regulator, auditor, or court requests it.

Consider what a HIPAA audit or an SEC inquiry actually involves. Someone needs to find a specific message from three years ago, or every communication between two employees over a six-month window. That communication could be an email, a Slack message, a Teams call, or a LinkedIn exchange.

Email and business communications archiving solutions are built for this. They capture communications across your channels in real time, store them immutably, and keep them fully searchable for years. That is what turns compliance from an abstract goal into something you can concretely demonstrate.

Different regulations set different retention timelines. But a solid communications and email archiving foundation keeps you prepared for those variations rather than scrambling to catch up each time the rules shift.

Business communications archiving that keeps you audit-ready

OpenText™ Cybersecurity has been helping organizations navigate these challenges with archiving solutions that make it easy for you to keep up as regulations change. Two options address the need from different angles, depending on the scope of your communications and the regulations you are managing. 

OpenText Business Communications Archive (BCA) is built for organizations that need to meet several regulatory compliance obligations across every way their teams communicate. Beyond email, BCA covers Slack, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, and more than 50 other communication sources, storing everything in an immutable state with flexible retention policies. Legal, HR, and compliance teams can search and retrieve records directly, without routing requests through IT.

OpenText MailStore is a dedicated email archiving solution for businesses that need to meet GDPR, GoBD, HIPAA, and related email compliance requirements. MailStore captures every email in real time, stores it securely, and keeps it fully searchable for years, so your business stays audit ready.

Compliance regulations will keep changing. Having the right communication and email archiving foundation means your business is ready when they do.