filledandchilled

by TWAM – Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Choosing an Email Archiving Solution

As large numbers of enterprises today are investigating email archiving solutions, it is critical to understand and evaluate these solutions. Before embarking on an email archiving solution there is a need to understand a range of business and technology issues. Understanding the reasons why your organization needs an email archiving solution and how to choose one that fits your needs will play a key role in choosing the right solution for your enterprise.

Need for Archiving

Regardless of the size of the industry, electronic search and electronic discovery have become prime considerations for every business. Electronic discovery is the retrieval of data to meet a legal request, regulatory compliance, human resource concern or any other corporate need. All organizations benefit from the search and discovery capabilities for email. It is therefore essential to provide a secure, searchable and centralized repository for email. And an archive can address the complete range of legal, regulatory, business and storage challenges presented by email.

Email Archiving Solutions

It is vital to examine the types of email archiving solutions as that will help in selecting a solution that will work best for your organization. Understanding the differences between the solutions is critical in determining the best solution.

In-house Archiving Solutions

An organization needs to define requirements and purchase the necessary software to deploy an in-house email archiving solution. The organization would also need a significant amount of storage hardware considering the large amount of email data that is usually sent. Typically, an in-house email archiving solution uses a dedicated, server based platform that copies all email from the message store into an archive.  There are certain solutions that require software to be employed on all employees’ PCs to facilitate searching and retrieval.

In-house solutions offer a high level of data security and control, along with convenient integration with other systems in the organization’s infrastructure. But when considering an in-house email archiving solution, organizations need to keep in mind the additional cost, as these solutions can be expensive to acquire and require skilled personnel to maintain.

Hosted Archiving Solutions

A hosted archiving solution is an alternative to the in-house approach. This solution allows a company to archive its data at a different location, thereby reducing the burden on internal IT resources. By outsourcing, the company can avoid the costs of buying the necessary hardware and software and do away with the inconvenience of maintaining an archiving system.

However, the lack of data security is a serious concern in this approach. Storing confidential data at a third party location can lead to security breaches and privacy concerns, as in most hosted solutions the archived data is not encrypted. Another additional challenge can be the actual management of the archives as there is no direct integration with the organization’s email server.

SAAS hybrid archiving solutions

The other approach that is fast emerging is the SAAS (software-as-a-service) hybrid model. This solution involves an appliance installed at the customer site that is pooled with secure storage managed in the cloud by a third party provider. This approach combines the convenience of a hosted solution with the best security features of an in-house solution. In certain instances, before the data leaves the customer location, encryption is performed, ensuring that the archived content can not be accessed from outside the customer’s network.

The hybrid solution is likely to become the popular approach as organizations come to understand the long term costs and maintenance required by email archiving.

As the electronic data within a corporate environment continues to rise, it is imperative to archive, especially considering that email is fast becoming the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence. It is therefore crucial for any business to have a sound solution in place.

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by Steve Rhodes

Top 3 Email Archiving Strategies for Your Enterprise

Email archiving strategies are essentially of three different types: in-house email archiving, hosted email archiving and hybrid email archiving. In this article we will explore the strengths of each of these strategies.

In-house email archiving, as the name suggests, is doing the email archiving completely within the enterprise; the data center is hosted and managed by the enterprise itself. In-house email archiving helps keep information within the enterprise, and it also ensures that tailor-made email archiving elements can be achieved that suit the enterprise’s goals and objectives. Such an email strategy ensures that enterprises have complete control over their email as well as ensures that they can be in command of the finances kept aside for email archiving purposes.

Even as there are plenty of enterprises who promote in-house email archiving, there are a few problems too, such as increased archiving maintenance costs, hiring of extra resources, etc. Owing to these problems, many other enterprises opt for hosted email archiving. In the hosted email archiving system, an enterprise’s emails are sent to the service provider who is entrusted with the job of storing it and ensuring that it can be retrieved whenever the enterprise wishes to see it. Since it is a simple exchange of service and the price paid is for a service, it can be stopped if the enterprise is unhappy with it. Alternatively hosted email archiving works for smaller enterprises who do not have a full-fledged IT department, which means that all their IT and systems worries about email archiving will be handled by the outsourced email archiving partner.

Despite the numerous benefits of a hosted email archiving system, many enterprises feel that asking an outside partner to manage their confidential email records can be detrimental for their enterprise. Therefore many enterprises are disinclined to opt for an external service provider for their email archiving needs because they still want to have control over their confidential email information. Such enterprises often opt for hybrid email archiving strategies. Email archiving solutions such as hybrid email archiving quite simply combine both in-house and hosted email archiving strategies and merge the actual benefits of the two. A system is typically fixed at the enterprise’s worksite which manages all the capturing of email traffic and sends it as an encrypted code to the service provider to be stored for future use or retrieval by the enterprise.

Enterprises are typically looking for email archiving solutions and strategies that are within their budgets and are also capable of providing the best possible service for data retention and retrieval.

by Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M

Email Archiving – The Achilles Heel of Document and Records Management

Email has developed into a major communication channel within every company with thousands of them being exchanged every day. As most business critical information is sent over email, it is imperative for companies to archive all records, whether in paper or electronic form for compliance purposes. The need for compliance has been mandatory due to demands made by government and regulatory bodies like the SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, which were primarily driven by instances of email mismanagement. Over the last couple of years more than 90% of disputes have included email as part of the evidence.

According to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, public companies must keep all documents and communications for seven years following an audit. The penalties for destroying or altering a document can include fines of up to million and imprisonment for up to 20 years. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that businesses that have the potential to be involved in lawsuits must prepare themselves to turn over email communications, if requested in a court case. Companies who don’t have access to this information may lose lawsuits or incur extra expenses to recover necessary emails. Hence, email is becoming the Achilles heel of document and records management. The best way to protect yourself is through an effective email archiving solution that has become a major challenge for companies.

What is Email Archiving?

Email archiving is an organized way of capturing, saving and protecting every email that moves through your organizations server so that users can access it later, all the while conserving storage space. Email archiving makes it easy to store and manage large volumes of email at a single time and with search and retrieve tools to locate specific emails within minutes, saving companies precious time.

Email archiving not only ensures that the organization remains compliant with applicable laws and regulations; it is the best way to meet eDiscovery requirements. Although email archiving projects are frequently managed by the exchange server administrator, the choice of email archiving software must be carefully evaluated before implementing.

Benefits of Email Archiving

More and more businesses are now using archiving for storage management, to monitor employee communications and for disaster recovery.

Monitoring Employee Communication – This is usually used in legal proceedings where e-mail evidence is requested in association with an employee’s violation of corporate e-mail policies or misuse of business e-mail.

Storage Management – Archiving data helps eliminate past messages and helps free up space on the email server.

Disaster Recovery – Disaster can halt the normal operation of day-to-day business activities. Archiving helps recover the information to the same or to a new server at disk-transfer and LAN speeds. You can recover accidentally deleted or destroyed records that have been archived.

Working without an email archiving solution could be dangerous. Email archiving is perfect for companies who are looking for a solution to protect their mission critical data, reduce server load from emails and preserve data for legal and regulatory compliance requirements.

by qthrul

It’s Time to Take Email Archiving & Security Seriously

With email having quietly matured into one of today’s most mission critical applications, could it be time to start taking its management, maintenance, and security rather more seriously?

As cultural phenomena go, the story of email’s emergence as the world’s undisputed champion of personal and business communication is about as impressive as any. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that there was a time not all that long ago, when deploying email was still considered a pretty big deal; when email meant specialist employee training; when half a dozen messages a day was a lot; when only the most senior management in a business could expect their own dedicated email accounts. How times change. Driven by all manner of market factors – server, storage, and software costs falling, the rise of always-on connectivity, teleworking, webmail, and mobile email to name just a handful – a robust, reliable, secure email solution is now nothing short of absolutely business critical. Indeed, issues such as email management, archiving, storage, and security now affect – or should affect – every company from SME to Enterprise, says Neil Hammerton, former CEO and founder of Email Systems, and currently VP of SaaS Development at Webroot. There are many drivers for this, he says. The need for information to be easily accessible where and whenever it’s required; Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II, which are driving archiving from a regulatory compliance perspective and which, in turn, are having a filterdown effect to businesses that don’t necessarily need to be compliant, but wish to employ best practice.

The threat of data loss is a further key factor, with industry reports indicating that 85% or more of a company’s intellectual property now passes through its email, according to Hammerton. “Businesses are conducting more and more legal transactions including quotes, orders, confirmations, and agreements via email”, confirms Duncan Ash, EMEA Business Development Manager with Sybase. “To protect both the organisation and its customers, these emails have to meet stringent statutory requirements governing document authenticity, confidentiality, and availability.”

Worryingly though, it appears that a disturbingly low number of UK businesses can be confident as regards the integrity of their email systems currently. In a recent study conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Forensic & Compliance Systems (FCS), nearly half the businesses surveyed (44%) couldn’t prove email hadn’t been changed or tampered with, and more than a third (35%) were unsure whether any changes had taken place or not; results that suggest that three in four UK businesses have millions of emails floating around their synapses that would enjoy no legal standing. It uncovers a worrying reality, said Ralph Harvey, CEO at FCS. Specifically that many firms simply don’t “understand the consequences of not having a tighter control over their emails…” It’s a problem businesses simply have to address, counsels Steve Tongish, marketing director EMEA at Plasmon. “European regulations are now developing teeth. There have been recent court cases in both the UK and Germany where steep fines have been imposed when the process controlling records and the integrity of data was found to be inadequate.” This shift in risk exposure, he says, is forcing a rethink in digital archive requirements.

Malcolm Etchells is VP Europe for Waterford Technologies – a provider of solutions that allow the visualisation of email usage, data pattern analysis, and policy improvement and enforcement. He also bangs the compliance drum, citing several costly cases. “Some of the world’s largest, most IT savvy organisations – UBS Warburg, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley – have fallen foul”, he says. “(Businesses) must begin to think more proactively about how to archive, retrieve, and produce emails and related content in the event of a request from a regulatory or government body.” “… the issue is not storing the emails – that’s relatively easy – but finding and retrieving (them). Many organisations can show authorities the email in the system but can’t retrieve it. A well-publicised example is Morgan Stanley which has been fined repeatedly because of its inability to retrieve emails, with two fines of million and .5 million respectively.”

Ash warns, that there is a “conflict” between the need for strong record maintenance and data privacy law however. For example, he explains, confidential data mustn’t be kept in archives accessible to supervisory bodies, and personal emails cannot be stored without the agreement of both sender and recipient. There are pressing productivity concerns too. First, says Ash, if email is filed in an unstructured way, it’s impossible to fully exploit the information contained within it. Second, with knowledge increasingly available only within emails, companies need a way to store, access, and analyse this precious data efficiently. And a ‘save all emails’ strategy is clearly not the answer, he says. Separating what can and can’t be stored calls for sophisticated technologies. “Most specialised email archiving solutions are based on file-oriented data management systems. These are neither audit-secure, nor able to conduct a combined analysis of structured and unstructured information.”

Etchells cites further productivity concerns. According to the Office of National Statistics, he says, employees spend an average of two hours a day assessing, managing, and responding to email, which equates to 55 days a year or 11 working weeks for every email user. Translated into costs, the figures are alarming. Based on an organisation with 1,000 employees earning an average of £25,000p.a., for instance, each spending 1 minute per inbound email on an average of 40 messages per day, and a further 4 minutes creating and sending each of around 20 emails every day, the estimated cost to the business over the course of a year would be £7.5million. And that’s without the cost of email misuse and storage. So what’s the answer? Says Etchells: “Productivity is very much seen as an issue for the IT department but it cannot be held responsible for reducing the volume of email sent by, or within, an organisation. Even with adequate storage in place, creating a culture of efficient and responsible email use needs to be driven by the business, not IT.”

Urs Raas, Senior Product Manager at enterprise content management (ECM) software vendor, Tower Software offers some practical first steps. “First you need a system that can automatically move mail into an archive that uses cheap storage and is easy to maintain from a back-up and disaster recovery point of view. Second you need a system that allows the easy capture of emails into the context of the business process, alongside any other records documenting it. This is where email archiving meets compliance.”

Michael Brooke, Archive Manager Product specialist at Quest Software argues that a solution must also reduce the total volume of information stored, and not simply move the problem from a mail store to another media. “80% of email volume is attachment data and in most organisations the duplication rate of attachment data is close to 50%. I.e. 50% of the attachment storage used by a Mail server is duplicate data!” He cites easy administration and cultural ignorance as other growing issues. “IT staff are busy people and an archiving solution that requires significant management time becomes a liability.” “IT staff know that storage is not unlimited but the business doesn’t, so the IT manager is often left explaining to senior management why the legal department can’t have a 10GB mailbox. They aren’t interested in the back-ups and recovery, what if a disputed contract they sent 2 years ago is no longer retrievable?”

Implemented properly, says Etchells, the benefits can be huge. “Having an intelligent email management solution in place will provide (an) insight into email usage, especially the patterns that cause waste.” It can also help identify and eliminate non-work related email, he says, and even change the way employees create, manage, and think about email.

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by Dublin City Public Libraries

Email Archivers Revisited

Several years ago, email archiving was a hot topic as the new rules of discovery prompted everyone to look at how they would produce the appropriate email documents in the event of a lawsuit. Interest in archivers has resurfaced, but this time customers are looking at these devices as a solution to reducing out-of-control data stores.

The Challenge

Just as traditional data stores continue to grow, so do our email stores. It seems like an overnight explosion! But as anyone who has tried to implement an email store reduction policy knows, getting end-users to give up the items they have retained is almost impossible. Blame ENRON if you like, but people are more aware than ever that they may need to produce documentation to safeguard themselves. And in this day and age, who can blame them?

Enter the Email Archiver

More and more customers are contacting us to review the current email archiving solutions available for GroupWise. They want to use this technology as a way to reduce their data stores while giving end-users the comfort of knowing that they can retrieve a given message any time they need it. Here are a few important questions to ask as you consider the most popular GroupWise email archiving solutions on the market:

* How are you going to use the archiver? If you are simply going to use the archiver to be sure that all messages are archived per your data retention policies, any archiver compatible with GroupWise can achieve this goal – particularly if you don’t anticipate your end-users going back to the archive on a regular basis to look for messages.

* Does the archiving solution maintain the folder structure of the end-user’s mailbox? Not all archivers will do this. However, if your end-users will be looking for old messages on a regular basis, they will want to see the familiar folder structure they use every day. A search function to find the messages is not enough.

* Does the archiver support stubbing? Stubbing is a really important feature if you are looking to convince your end-users that archiving is a good thing. Stubbing allows the message subject and the first few lines of an email to appear in the end-user’s live mailbox. The result? For the end-user, nothing seems to have disappeared from their mailbox, even though technically the emails have been archived!

* Are you going to be pulling mail from traditional GroupWise archives? Again, not all archivers support this functionality. If you are not only trying to reduce your live message store but also the data stores of archive files, you need to be sure that you pick an archiver that can seamlessly accommodate this function. If not, you will have to unarchive the messages back to the live message store, archive them to the archiver, and then reduce the message store.

* How much data are you planning to archive? Make sure that your archiver is not undersized and that you can easily add storage if necessary. Many archivers support NAS, SAN, or Windows file share targets. How much space you need is completely dependent on the retention policies of your organization. A rule of thumb? Plan for growth, and then work on getting buy-in from the powers that be to prune this data at some point after the archiver is in place.

Conclusion

Email archivers are a great way to reduce live message stores without getting end-users to commit to completely getting rid of data they want to retain. And remember, reducing message stores makes for faster and more seamless migrations to new hardware or operating system platforms. For customers looking to perform NetWare to Linux migrations, this is a great place to start when planning your GroupWise server migrations.

© Copyright 2010, Uptime NetManagement, Inc.

See how Elizabeth is able to use LiveOffice Personal Archive to quickly search and retrieve messages that are no longer in her inbox. LiveOffice is the leading provider of software-as-a-service email archiving, email compliance and email continuity solutions, with more than 10000 clients and a 97-percent client-retention rate.
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by Steve Rhodes

Email Archiving: are You Prepared for Unforeseen Legal Search Issues?

As every businessperson knows, controlling costs and increasing production is the basic business formula to achieve success. In reality, actually achieving that success is a much harder and intense proposition that requires you to provide a little wiggle room on both sides of the equation to deal with those pesky, unforeseen bumps in the road.

But what happens when a situation occurs that is so outside the sphere of normal business operations that you can neither deal efficiently nor effectively with it in order to get back to business as usual? In today’s technology driven business environment, this “situation” could be e-Discovery.

E-Discovery is defined as any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of being used as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. E-Discovery has the potential to become an extremely costly and time consuming undertaking especially when dealing with the retrieval of emails from archaic archiving systems commonly used today. To ease the burden, businesses are looking to companies such as Estorian who have developed software products that retrieve targeted communications sent via email and that work transparently with their own computer networks.

Still, the problem remains in that, despite the growing marketplace, businesses often do not know exactly what solutions they need to deal effectively with email archiving and retrieval. Or, if they are looking at various software packages, they do not know what key features that software should include. The following provides an overview to get you started:

• Software that is easy and quick to install, thus saving you time, money and resources during the initial set up.

• Simple user interface that is intuitive as well as easy for you to navigate.

• Multiple search options available such as keyword, sender/recipient (internal and external), date, time, attachments, subject, inbox/outbox, importance level, etc. so you can pull data from archives faster and more efficiently.

• Real time capabilities, i.e. the ability to set up recurring future searches (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) for investigations into specific subjects/email exchanges.

• Multiple location and file save capabilities such as .pdf, outlook folder, desktop folder, etc. for easy organization of email search reports.

• Flexibility to allow for future upgrades to search capabilities regarding legal and technological advances (IMs, chats, eFaxes, etc.).

Software packages such as Estorian’s LookingGlass incorporates all of these features and more, thereby providing businesses with an easy solution to company wide email archival and retrieval. As a result of using such products, businesses are reducing their legal and financial risk by continuously monitoring e-communications records across geographic locations and technical platforms from one single, easy to use interface.

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by Alan Stanton

Email Compliance and Records Management

Can you imagine living without email? How would you communicate your business needs, information and messages? All businesses across all industries use email systems to send and receive messages and communications. This form of communication has provided quicker response times making it easier to get our jobs done. Most companies depend on email as their primary form of communication and are more efficient because of it. However, email can also cause problems for businesses that don’t use it the right way. The abundance of email communication has caused the government to step in and take action against unlawful email actions. Now more than ever, it is vital for corporations to manage their email systems and ensure they are meeting government standards and regulations.

Recent government regulations affect all businesses–large and small companies alike. The Government is focused on regulating and protecting confidential customer information, corporate governance, law enforcement investigations, and overall proper corporate email management. Here are a few of the issues involving email in business today: Policy development and management, Email retention, Employee monitoring, Patch management, Spam, Legal liabilities, Confidentiality of intellectual property and Data integrity.

There are many companies that offer email records management solutions, but Estorian’s LookingGlass stands out above all. It provides one of the more seamless knowledge based email management solutions for corporate messaging. Estorian has developed an innovative solution that addresses the complex worlds for managing corporate email and messaging systems. Estorian’s LookingGlass e-mail records management system helps organizations meet the growing challenges of enforcing email use policies, controlling growth and resource costs, complying with federal and state email retention requirements, easy access and retrieval, and identifying misuse and abuse of corporate email systems.

www.jatheon.com – Why Archive Email? Jatheon Plug n Comply appliance is a complete solution that allows organization to comply with government regulation with a simple, secure and integrated product. Plug n Comply is the industry leading appliance that effectively captures, indexes and stores all email and instant messaging enabling you to enhance email management and achieve regulatory compliance needs. Maintaining a sole record or email communication is mission critical to business today. In addition companies must be prepared act quickly in the case of litigation or compliance regulations. Jatheons email archiving solutions are being used by companies all over the world across all industries. Whether it be law firms, banks, insurance companies, engineering firms, health care agencies, and municipal and federal agencies, all companies no matter what the size, see a need for the Jatheon email archiving solution. The Jatheon solution helps organizations meet their storage space management, compliance, legal discovery, mail platform migration and policy management requirements. Overall, Jatheon offers a comprehensive, cost effective and easy to deploy archiving appliance that requires minimal IT support and simple management of corporate data, making it a suitable solution for companies of all sizes. Jatheons email archiving appliance has a number of different ROI characteristics that make the decision making process a relatively easy one. * Reduced overall capital …
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by TechShowNetwork

Email Compliance with ediscovery

Email has become the most prominent form of correspondence with great value attached to its use. Email can be used for external and internal purposes and is extremely vital in the daily commercial activities of a business. Email is the equivalent of paper documentation and is considered legal and valid proof for litigation purposes. Email is documentation of conditions agreed upon by two parties and can be used as supportive evidence when implicating another or while defending one’s integrity.

Since email messages are legally approved documents that need to be provided in case of a lawsuit, there is a need to store them in a secure place and ensure all security measures are in place to prohibit any tampering attempts. The storing of email is called archiving, and it locates any specific email at any time in a secure environment. The electronic discovery service helps in simple management of email and compliance with an efficient e-discovery and often times archiving strategy.

Why Email Compliance?

Organizations should implement a robust compliance system that will record all logs and activities of users as well as audit and encrypt data to retain it in its original form. Deliberate attempts to destroy data can prove to be potent litigation evidence. Ediscovery solutions can help identify relevant dat, but that data cannot be identified if it has been deliberately deleted. In legal cases, if the parties involved are incapable of furnishing relevant email evidence, fines may be imposed by the courts and cases can potentially be lost. .

Determining Ediscovery Factors for Email Compliance

It is not an easy job for organizations to maintain email compliance standards given the steady stream of correspondence everyday. Ediscovery can help management handle compliance issues. Here are some factors that need to be taken into account to maximize the use of ediscovery solutions for email compliance.

1. An efficient ediscovery solution uses an integrating approach that takes care of all processes while creating no complications. In due course, organizations will be faced with situations where they need to add applications. A good ediscovery solution should be capable of providing the integrating facilities to avoid additional costs in the future. Archiving is achievable only when an integrating facility is provided.

2. To maintain records and secure compliance, ediscovery tools should be able to manage different types of data within a single archive. Having a single system to handle various data formats eliminates the creation of multiple archives.

3. To save on storage space and ensure simple archiving administration, the ediscovery tool needs to ensure there is no duplication of data and convert several copies into a one to make the process smooth.

4. The structural design of electronic discovery service should be such that processing is not concentrated at one single point, which can slow down the pace of the searching and indexing processes.

5. The main purpose of archiving is to make search easy. Ediscovery search should have the capacity to bring up successful search results with little delay when keywords are used. Searching for exact results should be possible in a transparent manner.

Litigation cases can be rendered useless without enough proof to validate statements, resulting in heavy financial and reputation losses. The ediscovery solution promotes an efficient system of searching, producing data through a flexible and transparent system.

Related Email Compliance Articles

by Brooklyn Museum

Why Businesses need a Solution for Outlook Email Archiving

Ranging from business compliance to the performance of Outlook itself there are many reasons why in today’s world a company needs to look for a successful Outlook email archiving solution. There are a number of issues that businesses face with regards to email archiving and compliance below this article focuses on the more critical issues and some of the solutions to these problems. Whilst this article is focusing predominantly on businesses that use the Outlook and Microsoft Exchange systems much of what is discussed will be relevant to all businesses, particularly in the US and the UK.

Research has shown that the average worker can spend up to 90 minutes of every workday managing their mailboxes and performing archiving and data management tasks. This leads to loss of productivity to the entire business. Aside from the productivity issues most Exchange servers are only set to backup information once per day, meaning that any emails that have been deleted through the course of a day are not archived this can also be said to the auto archiving feature that Outlook has.  Also due to the way that the auto-archive feature works, finding a specific email that has been archived is incredibly laborious and time consuming.

There are several issues that need to be looked at with regard to the need for a good email archiving solution, these issues are outlined below.

Data flow over time

Before looking at any of the legal ramifications or performance problems of not having a good email archiving solutions it is important to first look at the points which create these issues.

Even smaller companies will generate massive amounts of emails over a long period of time.  This is caused by storage of emails and attachments, however part of the problem stems from having all versions of these emails stored for example: an email is sent out with a 1 MB attachment to every employee (30 people). Every reply to that email is also now being stored along with the original email text. Whilst the email sizes are not of any real significance at this point, over a period of a year with multiple instances of this example the storage required will add up, especially with taking into account the attachment being saved also.

Auto Archiving

Many businesses feel that they have no problems with archiving as they have the Outlook auto archiving in place for their company emails. This unfortunately is not as helpful as it may at first seem to be.  As mentioned earlier, any emails deleted prior to the auto-archive taking place are not archived.  This in itself provides massive issues with compliance which will be covered later. 

A common problem shared by all companies that rely on the Outlook auto archive tool is initially the build up of emails and more specifically the overall deterioration of performance from the Microsoft Exchange servers as a consequence of a large email volume.  As the Exchange servers fill with archived emails the system begins to slow and takes longer to perform each backup. The servers filling also increase the chance of a critical systems failure.

Outlook saves all email data as .pst files when it archives the old emails. Many .pst files will be created over time as bulk archives are created over a period of time. How often this happens depends on the specific settings a company has organised themselves and how many emails the company has sent and received within specifically set parameters. These parameters would be determined by the company’s individual settings.  The more data stored on a .pst file the slower the servers and Outlook will function for their various daily tasks such as a backup.

A more pressing concern with the way that Outlook auto archive functions however is that bulk email packages are saved as .pst files, specifically a maximum storage per file of 20 GB. 20 GB of space can store thousands of emails; if a .pst file is corrupted the information on every one of those emails can potentially be lost forever.  Aside from the difficulty for an individual to navigate these files to locate specific emails when called upon to do so, if the files are lost this can provide very costly issues with regard to compliance.

Compliance

The issues of compliance covers multiple different points that will affect companies to different degrees depending on what countries they are in or do business with. That said all of these points are worth understanding as the laws are quickly changing world wide to cover the issues raised by emails being regarded as legal documents. Whilst the specifics below are predominantly for the UK, other countries will have similar laws with different specifics laid out.

Freedom of Information Act 2000 (UK)

The public have the right to ask for copies of emails from public authorities. The authorities then have 20 days in which to provide the copies.

Data Protection Act

Individuals have the right to request for copies of personal data held about them by an authority or company. The authority or company then has a 40 day time frame for compliance; failure to comply can lead to heavy fines.

Employment Tribunals

The highest possible award at a tribunal for unfair dismissal in the UK is £66,200. With more communication in the places of work happening via email, companies need to ensure that they have easy access to all possible evidence available to protect themselves

Court Actions

A wronged party has 6 years from the date that a contract has been breached or a civil wrong committed to bring a court action. With emails potentially being used by either party it is necessary for a company or organisation to be able to access any information required that was stored within those previous 6 years. This means it is paramount that an organisation has the best possible email archiving system available to them.  The system the organisation uses can make the difference between winning and losing a court action.  Furthermore inability to provide requested evidence can result in heavy fines depending on the nature of the court action, thus having the ability to store and easily find the information could avoid these fines before a court action ever reaches a court.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

This is a piece of US legislation also affects any company outside of the US which is listed on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, including subsidiaries of US companies that are themselves based outside of the US. The Act states that any transactional data meet the requirement of the Act.  Furthermore the Act sates over several sections that an organisation’s IT department is obligated to be able to provide any and all electronic data pertinent to a potential case during the discovery period in the event of a lawsuit or investigation.  Simply put an organisation must be able to provide copies of any electronic data as requested during the discovery period, the period prior to a case where evidence is collected to prepare for the legal proceeding, to a legal action.  Failure to provide the evidence in the discovery period results in heavy fines which are weighted against the nature of the legal proceeding.

The Solution

Most of the problems outlined above are not new and have been occurring for years, however with the exponential increase in the use of computers and by extension email these problems have begun to be far more severe and obvious.  The only possible solution is for a company to utilise an email archiving solution. The qualities one should look for in an email archiving solution, as outlined by the problems listed above, are as follows:

Can function independently from the Outlook’s auto archive facility Allows for settings to be standardised with capacity for users to create and archive new email folders with ease A program that does not rely on storing emails in bulk but instead saves each email individually so as to avoid the issues of file corruption. However still provides the functionality to archive files at the same time A solution that allows for customised archiving structures allowing companies to tailor how and where the files are saved. A solution which allows for deletion upon archiving of the emails from Outlook to again avoid high email volume effecting Microsoft Exchange servers Intuitive design to negate the need for training or complications prior to use of the solution. A solution that saves emails in a format that is readable independently of Outlook

It is important that all these criteria be met at the very least when looking for a solution to email archiving with Outlook to avoid all of the problems listed above. In the end avoiding these problems could save your business time and money and avoid the issue of decreased productivity from staff spending too much time organising mailboxes.

MsgSave is an Outlook add-in designed to tackle all of the afore mentioned issues and many more. MsgSave is offered in 3 different versions to meet your specific needs. MsgSave is a product of Sarcophagus a leader in IT business solutions.

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by TechShowNetwork

3 Things Businesses Need to Know About Email Compliance

In today’s business world, we are nothing without our email. Now, we don’t even need to be sitting in our office to hear the ding of our inbox, alerting us that yet another message has arrived; we live in a time where smart phones are everywhere and we can have our email with us at all times. With all this new technology though, there has also come an onslaught of laws that are designed to keep email compliant with things like customer privacy, law enforcement investigations, and corporate governance. In short, the purposes of the laws are to make sure that email is being used, and managed, properly.

If you work for a doctor’s office, you certainly know about HIPAA. The two rules that affect email compliance are the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule. Of the two, the Security Rule is more in-depth and essentially mirrors the Privacy Rule; its purpose is to focus on information and security best practices and revolves around the security cornerstones of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The Security Rule focuses on everything from workstation management of information to facility access and transmission security. It is vital that any information you send via email, not speak of the patient’s identity or the problem they are facing; many offices will use initials when speaking about patients via email.

In the financial industry, email compliance is governed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Also known as GLBA, it is basically the same law as HIPAA, just for a different type of business. It is designed to ensure the privacy and security of non-public personal information as it relates to individuals financial information. GLBA’s rules apply to mortgage lenders, banks, stock firms and others of the like. Within GLBA, the financial company is charged with several things: to designate an employee or employees to coordinate the information security program, to identify reasonably foreseeable risks to non-public information, to make sure their suppliers are also using safeguards, and to monitor all of the above.

On top of these two rules, there are also others. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also known as SOX, is watched over by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This act was designed in response to the various, and highly publicized, bogus financial reporting in the early 2000s. SOX discusses what information may leave an organization and how long the industry should keep information on file; it requires that financial companies keep emails on file for six years. Likewise, the SEC Rule 17a-4 and NASD Rules 3010 and 3110 affect email communications within the financial industry.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to email compliance, there are rules everywhere, and your business needs to know which apply to you and how to handle them. There are several ways to handle these issues, most of which include hiring at least some type of IT security firm to develop a total information security plan that will comply with recent, and future, government email regulations.

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