There are four key reasons for an organization to archive its email. These are compliance, judicial discovery, storage management, and knowledge control.
Compliance
The new regulatory environment is one of the major drivers behind the increase in demand for email archiving solutions.
Although the data subject to regulatory statutes varies by industry, all records that pertain to the organization’s business activity are subject to compliance regulations. These include employee and client records, correspondence between organizations, and financial documentation.
Other legislation defines requirements for specific regulated industries. Some legislation relates to the amount of time records must be held, while other legislation relates to what can be held. While it is not always clear-cut what these laws require, and there is some degree of subjectivity in interpreting the laws, several common themes emerge:
◆ Electronic business records (including email communications) are now placed under the same scrutiny as their paper-based counterparts. Failure to manage these records properly and failure to reproduce certain email data upon request could be deemed an obstruction of justice.
◆ Organizations are being required to archive email data systematically as a standard course of business and, in some cases, on a inalterable storage medium to bolster the evidentiary value of this data.
◆ Organizations are being required to document their data management practices and requirements related to email and to communicate this information to employees so that all stakeholders are on notice as to the liabilities associated with email messages.
◆ Metadata or descriptive information about the email data itself is viewed as a key consider- ation when evaluating the evidentiary value of archived email messages.
Although many regulations exist and each seems to have its own requirements, email archiving compliance is based on three main concepts:
◆ Archived data must be retained in its original state without being altered or deleted. ◆ Archived information that is retained must be safeguarded against all security threats,
which include access by unauthorized persons as well as anything that could physically damage or endanger the availability of the information.
◆ Archived information should be easily accessible in a timely manner by authorized person- nel whenever required.
Any archiving plan and product should ensure that these exist. Judicial Discovery
Sooner or later every company, large or small, is going to become involved in a lawsuit, either as a defendant or a plaintiff. Every lawsuit inevitably involves the process of judicial discovery.
Discovery is the process in which parties involved in a lawsuit are requested by the court to submit information that is relevant to the case. The company that receives the discovery request must search its records and submit all the relevant/requested information in a timely manner. Recent court rulings have acknowledged that the company providing the information must endure the discovery cost, without reimbursement. As you can imagine, as is shown in our real-world examples, the cost of producing the information for litigation can be colossal and can often outweigh the damages sought in the suit, especially if the organization does not have an adequate email archiving solution in place.
An issue with discovery requests is that there is no specific time limit that defines on how far back a company must search. Organizations are required to provide all copies of email relevant to the request, regardless how far back this may be. The completeness and availability of all the requested records and the time required to extract this information depends very much on the organization’s email storage management and employee behavior.
Other issues that need to be considered are that litigation support information must be accurate, complete, and possibly in its original state. An organization that fails to submit the information requested in a legal discovery can be found guilty of ‘‘spoliation.’’ This is legal term describes the improper destruction of evidence. If a court feels that there is a basis to believe spoliation has occurred, it can do a number of things, almost all of them bad for the party found involved in spoliation. The court can order a verdict for the other party, or the court can assume that the lost information was harmful to the party that failed to produce it and instruct a jury to act accordingly. Finally, there can be hefty fines.
Storage Management
It has been estimated that one in every four organizations experiences a storage management growth rate in excess of 25 percent per year. It is also estimated that nearly 50 percent of orga- nizations are providing more than 150 MB of storage per user. A study by Osterman Research affirms that email stores are growing at 37 percent annually. Consequently, keeping email in a ‘‘live’’ (online) storage format will necessitate more physical storage space as well as increasingly powerful hardware to handle these loads. Compliance regulations have further contributed to the increased demand for storage by obliging organizations to preserve old email for
predefined periods.
Email archiving solutions can be used to provide a more versatile way of storage management by doing the following:
◆ Centralizing the organization’s email records. ◆ Storing emails in a compressed format.
◆ Automatically archiving emails as they pass through the message store.
◆ Allowing authorized users to view emails from a central repository can encourage them to eliminate bulky PST files stored locally.
Knowledge Control
An organization’s email system is also a vast and comprehensive corporate knowledge repository. It can contain vast quantities of useful email information that are often vital to a business, and allowing access to this corporate asset can make users more productive.
An email archiving system can provide appropriate knowledge management tools (for example, email record sorting, advanced searching, and retrieval functions) that enable IT and end users to better manage the knowledge base contained in the company’s email archive.
Performance
Archiving can enhance performance. By decreasing the size of the primary email database, the performance of the email servers is enhanced and there is a subsequent reduction in the amount of high-performance storage required for email.
Backup and recovery operations will be improved as well. Because persistent (that is, static) data is archived, the amount of unchanged data that is backed up again and again is reduced.
Email Archiving Planning Considerations
Based on the above, any email archiving solution should include the following features: ◆ Emails should be archived automatically and with the minimal human intervention
possible.
◆ Archived emails should be indexed, especially the text content, so that search facilities will enable the quick extraction of records to support regulatory audit requests and legal discovery.
◆ The email archiving plan system must include configuration features through which the company can define its archiving criteria. These features should at least allow archiving of specific mailboxes and messages from specific domains or email addresses.
◆ The email archiving system must be able to ensure that records are secure from loss, dam- age, or misuse. The solution must include access restriction features.
◆ Journaling must be used for organizations that are using the email archive solution for gov- ernance (i.e., a system of record), since it ensures that each email is captured
and saved.
◆ The solution should enable a company to use its email archive as a central knowledge repository from where authorized users can extract information required. Depending on how the system is configured, the retrieval can essentially be transparent to the end user.
◆ The archiving system should support all major messaging platforms to ensure standards compatibility.