Email Archiving

The question is, why practice email archiving? The fact is, the main reasons for an organization to archive its email can be divided into 4 classes. These are: Compliance, litigation support, storage management and knowledge management. Let us look at them all.

Regulatory Compliance

The new regulatory environment is one of the most important factors behind the increase in demand for email archiving solutions. It is estimated that over 10,000 compliance regulations have been issued around the world. More stringent controls and severe penalties force organizations to address regulatory compliance more seriously.

 

Although there are many regulations and each of them have their own requirements, the compliance issue can be based on 3 main concepts:

• Data permanence – The concept of data being retained in the original condition without being deleted or altered.
• Data security – The retained information has to be safeguarded to protect it against threats that include unauthorized individuals accessing it and also any physical damage to such information.
• Auditability – This is the idea of protecting information by providing easy and timely access to all those who are authorized and whenever needed.

However not all emails fall under compliance regulations. The exemptions include all spam’s for which there is no need for saving and also all personal emails (most people receive personal emails even in the official email address). But these emails can also be asked for when the issue of litigation support for investigation comes up.

Litigation support

Litigation discovery is a process where the parties who are involved in the lawsuit are asked by a legal court to come up with information that cane be relevant to a case. The company receiving the discovery request has the responsibility of searching its records for the submission of all information that is relevant/requested timely. Cost of coming up with this litigation information can be huge, often outweighing the damages asked for in a suit. This is quite common in companies that do not keep a satisfactory email archiving system in place.

A problem with requests for discovery is, there are no specific time limits for which the company needs to search. Companies are asked to come up with all email copies that may be relevant to a request, no matter how backdated they may be. The availability and completeness of the asked for record and the time it takes to get this information may depend on the organization’s management of email storage and behavior of the employees. In recent rulings it has been acknowledged that a company that provides the needed information has to incur the cost of discovery and there will be no reimbursement.

Information for litigation support has to be complete, accurate and preferably original. The organization that cannot submit such information that is requested in the legal discovery may be guilty of ‘spoliation’ (a legal term that is used for describing wrong evidence destruction like deleting the company email). Such circumstances may prompt a court order towards the opposition or it may lead the court to understand that information that is lost is potentially damaging for the party that cannot produce it. Here is one major reason why it becomes necessary to practice email archiving.

Storage management

It is assumed that, 1 in 4 companies face a growth in storage management of over 25% annually. Organizations use storage of email quotas to prevent the message stores from exploding and bringing down the server performance. But the quotas have an adverse effect on the productivity of the end user.

Storage solutions are used for dealing with message storing growth problems, the email archiving answer may provide a better way to manage this issue. The archiving solution that is efficient will keep the emails compressed in a central database and this will lead to considerable savings in the disk space when it is compared to the traditional mail storing system. Furthermore, the emails will be archived automatically whenever they are passed through a message store, and because of this, users are able to keep their mailboxes clean and remain worry free. When the authorized users are able to view the emails from the central database with help from the email archiving product, they will stop keeping PST files that can be bulky locally.

PST files normally take two to five 5 times excess physical storage space than the email archive, and so, this adds up to quite a bit of savings in the disk space.

Knowledge management

An organization’s email system can be the knowledge storehouse. It contains huge email information that is often very important to the business and accessing this can enhance productivity.

Truly it is necessary to maintain email archives.