Jatheon Email Archiving In The News
Improve Email Archiving Without Breaking The Bank
By Drew Robb
July 11, 2008
Retention Policies Play A Pivotal Role
Email archiving is becoming law in more and more countries and states. Most recently, Canada mandated the technology for financial services firms by the end of the year. Such regulations are placing a financial burden on many small to mid-sized enterprises.
“Many firms have raised concerns about the overwhelming costs of physical storage and difficulties in developing a suitable email archival and retrieval system,” says Kieron Dowling, president and CEO of Jatheon Technologies
(www.jatheon.com).
There are ways to improve archiving, though, without it costing an arm and a leg.
Backup Is Not Enough
The first thing to cover is what not to do. With budgets tight, some firms try to avoid the cost of archiving hardware and software by reasoning that their backup tapes can also serve as a makeshift archive. However, backing up copies of email servers will not meet most record-keeping requirements. In fact, backup technologies actually can’t do email archiving.
“Backup tapes don’t archive all email messages; if a user sends an email to a co-worker and minutes later both users delete all traces of that email, the backup tape will not capture that email,” says Dowling. “Backup tapes don’t maintain copies of emails exchanged between backups or retain copies of emails deleted by users after the backup is replaced with a newer one.”
To make matters worse, backup tapes can even slow down the retrieval process. Many companies have already experienced the nightmare of scrambling through hundreds of old backup tapes to find specific emails. As they lack a search capability, backup tapes require IT staff to manually look for requested emails. And from a legal perspective, the integrity of the emails retrieved cannot be confirmed; that is, if a user receives an email and subsequently edits and resaves it, overwriting the original, a backup tape would not have a copy of the original.
“An email archive, on the other hand, stores, indexes, retrieves, and monitors all inbound, outbound, and internal email messages and file attachments in real time,” Dowling notes. “It can ensure that email and attachments have not been altered. An email archive would retain a copy of the user-deleted email, as well as the original and modified versions of the user-edited email. And an email archive’s index expedites email retrieval.”
Set Policy Correctly
Archiving hardware or software won’t do the job alone. It has to be backed up by the right policy in order to gain real value.
“The first step to improving email archiving is to establish retention policies,” says Moosa Matariyeh, a storage specialist at CDW.
Policy must be set wisely for retention of emails. It must incorporate the intricacies of the law, including federal law, the various states’ laws, and other countries’ laws, all of which may demand different retention periods for different file types and documents.
Such policy, however, cannot be developed in an ivory tower or by IT alone, or by some other unit. Ideally, it should be developed with input throughout the organization. The result will be more broadly applicable and will facilitate more internal compliance.
“Policy for how email will be used and retained should be developed with input from across the organization—IT, legal, HR, compliance, customer relations, and administrative departments,” says Dowling. “Make sure international divisions of the company are included, too.”
Communicate Archiving Policy & Usage
There should be one policy for retention and another for email usage throughout the company, and those policies have to be communicated well for employees to observe them. Managers should notify all employees, for example, not just through email but through training and department meetings.
Such training and orientation makes several things clear to employees. They will begin to understand that loose talk in email could come back to bite them. Make sure they know what the various penalties are.
“Everyone in the company should understand both appropriate and inappropriate use of email and that violating usage guidelines is a punishable offense,” notes Dowling. “Employees should also know that copies of everything they send are being archived; this knowledge alone often results in fewer instances of inappropriate messaging.”
Simplify Policy
Some companies bog down their archiving systems with too many do’s and don’ts. For instance, one regulation says to keep File Type A for two years, File Type B for five years, and File Type C for seven years, and after awhile, that can become impractical or can be extremely costly to implement, especially for SMEs.
Dean Richardson, vice president of ArcMail Technology, says the best way to improve email archiving is to keep it simple. Having different policies for different users or departments does not address the data content, which is where the retention policies almost always apply. “Archive everything possible and use a single retention period,” he says. “You never know which email message will be critical years down the road when you need it.”
Follow Jatheon on Twitter | Find Jatheon on Facebook
© 2009 Jatheon Technologies, Incorporated