Compliance and volume force email archiving rethink

Hunt: Review and validate any written policies on what to keep, what to file and how long to keep it for

Managing a business email system is not easy, especially when the customer is faced with the need to comply with potential new laws, and hampered by increasing data volumes.

Keeping up with email management manually can take hours. The volumes are too great and some messages must be filtered into folders – and getting it wrong can mean exposing a business to litigation.

Self-management systems are not practical due to the overwhelming volume of email and the fact that written policies on what to keep, what to file and how long to keep it are open to interpretation or may be gradually forgotten and disregarded.

Are emails ‘records’ or just data? They certainly don’t look like Word or Excel documents, yet a one-line email mentioning a workmate may fall foul of all sorts of laws.

Customers should get their CIO and legal counsel on board when devising an email archiving strategy, working with the reseller on the new system while developing information retention policies. This can prevent delays later. A project team should include members from all key departments and stakeholders, including IT, legal and human resources as well as business operations.

The first step is to understand the variety of documents that can exist across all applicable departments and to review any existing policies. This phase of the project includes classifying records by input from each department involved.

Classification and metadata search parameters may be built into a policy manager component of whatever software or other product is selected.

Project objectives may include capacity management to reduce the storage demands of the email system on IT resources, including servers and disk storage; compliance management; the need for data to be retrievable on demand and retained for inspection; and the ability to define when email can or must be deleted permanently from the system. The latter should be agreed in consultation with the customer’s lawyer.

A customer’s records management system should be able to interrogate the contents of live email stores, search deleted items, support delegated supervisor searches and help the business comply with the latest laws around information disclosure and similar.

Some vendors claim that to control email records you need to archive and index them. Writing into an archive adds complexity and may well cause problems when the customer needs to investigate something.

Although much corporate email is mission-critical, too many resources are wasted on unimportant or irrelevant data. It is not essential to archive everything in order to decide whether to keep it.

Customers need a systematic and efficient approach to managing email. IT administrators require full control and flexibility over archived and live email as well as discovered .pst files.

A good product should let the user filter emails or other information by age or size, recipient, subject, attachment type, or specific word content.

An automated filter that meets all the customer’s criteria can be set to run hourly, daily, weekly or at chosen intervals, and can apply to all or some users.

Efficient email management can help reduce operating costs, slashing the time and resources needed to manage and retrieve information.

Dave Hunt is chief executive officer of C2C