Email Archive Appliance

by 350.org

Email Archive Appliance

Today email system is the biggest tool in every business & this dependency of email system on business brings various problems. There are many issues which generally arise like: Storage, backups, problematic PST files, access to old emails and legal compliance. To solve and tackle these problems you need an Email Archiving Software & Email management solution.

Not only this, you need such a kind Email archiving solution which should be cost effective, easy to install and need very less administrative efforts.

So here is a solution of your problem. ITA Networks offers Email Archiving Software for Exchange Server 2000, 2003 & 2007. ITA Networks Email Archive easily manage the email processing system & its simple functions need very less administrative efforts to search and restore emails & archive mails.

• ITA Networks email archive works automatically & copy every single email that pass through Exchange server & stores all the mails in email server database.

• You could use stored emails from database anytime even when Exchange Server is offline due to problems or any reason.

• ITA Networks email archive moves essential & important data from mailboxes and stores the data Exchange Server database.

• ITA Networks email Archive extracts attachments form mails and save attachments separately & provides link for attachments in the links.

• ITA Networks email Archive provides security in case of critical e-mails getting lost due to PST files getting corrupted or e-mails getting lost for any reason. Backups take time to restore whereas Admin T own email Archive provides instant access to the e-mails, one more important reason for deploying ITA Networks email Archive on your network today.

• ITA Networks email Archive comes with built in SQL Database, so you do not have need to purchase additional software to store the emails.

• ITA Networks email Archive provides ability of search, view and restore emails to all users.

• ITA Networks email Archive connector system makes the process of archiving existing e-mails completely automated, easy, and effortless.

So with the help of ITA Networks email archive solution make your email system effortless and get good performance. To know more about of ITA Networks email Archive, visit this link:
Email Archive Appliance

For free Download visit here: Download Email Archive Appliance

If you need more information about ITA Networks email Archive software for Exchange Server 2000, 2003 & 2007 then you go through with these links:
Email Archive Appliance

: Clear and simple guidance for managing your email infrastructure Email is the dominant form of c

by TechShowNetwork

: Clear and simple guidance for managing your email infrastructure Email is the dominant form of c

Email is the dominant form of communication within many organizations so it’s essential to set out the rules for how it should be used.

Chief Information Officers and IT managers in the highly regulated health and financial industries or in large, publicly traded organizations are usually well aware of what is required for email compliance. For privately held or smaller companies and non-regulated industries, email compliance is often unclear and the apparent complexity and serious consequences for violators can make the task of complying seem daunting.

The concern is largely unjustified. According to the definition of compliance opposite, for most organizations, compliance is achieved by operating under a formal set of clearly defined guidelines that ensure adherence both to formal legislation and to accepted ethical standards and best practices. These guidelines should also cover how to handle deviations, accidental or otherwise. In the absence of guidelines it becomes extremely difficult to respond positively and effectively to an audit (or “eDiscovery”), or worse, a legal inquiry. This document looks at compliance in relation to email, giving clear and simple guidance for managing your email infrastructure*.

1. Establish clear rules about email usage

Email is the quintessential communications tool with much of an organization’s day-to-day life dependent on it for both internal and external communication. Email can contain as much as 80% of a company’s business records so setting out the rules for how it should be used is essential.

The starting point is to define a clear and transparent framework for behavior, setting down what’s acceptable and what isn’t when it comes to using email. An explicit, organization-wide Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), accompanied by the ability to audit its use and enforce its rules is a simple first step in demonstrating the intention to meet regulations and goes a long way toward avoiding liability. As an example, typical clauses might be:

don’t forward or send email containing pornographic images

do limit attachment sizes to 5MB.

With the AUP in place, you can then focus on ensuring that your practices are compliant with the wide range of local, regional, national and international laws that extend into email communications.

A wide range of online examples is available from industry analysts such as Forrester, IDC and Gartner.

2. Prevent data loss via email

The data that you hold in your systems is valuable business information. It must be guarded carefully from accidental or deliberate disclosure of confidential information to parties outside and, on occasion, within your organization. Some of the processes will be covered by your AUP, but new employees, leaving employees, distracted employees and disgruntled employees can all inadvertently (or maliciously) threaten the security of your data.

It is essential to put in place an automated, centrally managed mechanism to prevent data loss regardless of intention or the goodwill of your employees. This solution should be able to:

block emails by the filetypes of their attachments

scan messages for keywords

add disclaimers and banners to mail in all directions

encrypt messages so that only the intended recipient can read them

ensure that your email system is not being abused by unknown and/or malicious users.

3. Maintain visibility over and access to current and past traffic

You need to make sure that you are aware of – and can account for – the email coming into, going out of and circulating around your organization. This means you must:

Retain accessible records of relevant email communications, including log information that can show who sent what to whom and when.

Copy and/or archive sensitive messages, both internal and external.

Be able to intercept and re-route violating messages to those responsible for enforcement so that potentially damaging incidents can be avoided and remedial efforts can take place.

It is important to recognize that not every email contains sensitive data, so not everything needs to be archived and/or encrypted. Depending on your jurisdiction, there are also limits on how long you must retain copies of email communication.

In fact, the cost of storing and accessing large volumes of email requires you to be deterministic when it comes to what needs archiving or encryption, and how long you should be storing.

4. Eliminate spam, phishing and malware

One of the main ways that virus writers get malware onto your users’ computers and into your systems is through email. Spam campaigns that rapidly change in order to attempt to evade detection use a variety of methods – such as dropping keylogging Trojans or linking to malicious websites – to steal confidential business and personal information.

You must ensure, and be able to demonstrate, that your email infrastructure is protected against malware, viruses, spyware and other threats to system and data integrity. For this you need a solution that blocks malware, spam, Denial of Service attacks, and harvesting of email addresses.

By blocking threats at the perimeter right through to your internal mail servers and desktops, you will eliminate most of the external risk associated with data loss. Your AUP will go a long way toward covering the remaining internal risk.

*Disclaimer: this is not intended to replace professional/legal guidance on compliance issues that your organization may face. We strongly suggest that you seek advice from recognized compliance experts to determine your needs.

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Why Businesses need a Solution for Outlook Email Archiving

by Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M

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.

Elsa explains what Exchange email archiving software is all about. Elsa appears courtesy of Red Gate Software (www.red-gate.com).
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Next-generation Email Compliance and Legal Discovery Software

by MotorShowNetwork

Next-generation Email Compliance and Legal Discovery Software

Email archiving has become an increasingly complicated task companies which need to complete in order to comply with compliance laws, while internal data archiving may be considered something exclusive of banks and financial institutions, laws have been enacted to regulate several other industries.

The following list briefly shows the industries and laws which are to be kept:

Healthcare: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 1996, which involves patient health data encryption during transmission throughout a network.

Hedge Funds: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 2006 regulations on private investment pools, this involves archiving and securing all electronic communication.

Pharmaceutical: 21 CFR Part 11 by the FDA (1997) which involves rules for the use of electronic signatures and records.

Accounting: The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, 2002. This law sets strict regulations about the retention and maintenance of records.

Banking: The Gramm-Leach Bliley Act, 1999. This law was enacted to protect customer’s information while in transit or in storage by strict encryption measures.

Securities: SEC 17a-4 and NASD 3010. Both regulations set strict standards on electronic communications which involves emails.

As stated above, businesses operating within these industries are expected to comply with information archival, encryption and maintenance regulations. The problems with these laws is that they require strict classification of internal data which can’t be accomplished using traditional email applications such as Microsoft Outlook or any other mail client.

The fact that a company can gather hundreds of thousands and even millions of emails and electronic communications is overwhelming, not to mention that if the company in question is inspected, owners and managers have to sort and classify all of these records within a short period of time since inspectors won’t wait weeks or months to have all this information sorted out.

Managing and classifying this information is one requirement which is hard to accomplish but these laws also require heavy encryption to make sure data won’t be leaked or modified from the network and fall into the wrong hands. As you can see there are many guidelines which need to be kept so it is imperative to use software tools which can be managed by one person quickly and efficiently, these law compliance tools should provide features such as:

* Accurate Search platform

* Find and collect all electronic communication within the network with a single operation

* Classification of all incoming and outgoing emails through automatic global policies

* Extremely Strong Internal Controls for Compliance

* Verified and unalterable logs

* Full auditing of all searches, email reviewed, and logons

* Powerful data collection tools

* Data loss protection

As you can see all of these tasks are so complex and time intensive that even if assigned to an entire division of a company, it couldn’t be accomplish quickly, securely and accurately; that is why special electronic communication management software is required. It is extremely important to keep in mind that the use of this technology is not a luxury but the LAW. Using these tools can help you keep your business going without worrying about communication compliance laws.

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Email Compliance and Records Management

by MotorShowNetwork

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.

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Email management plays important role in your business, handle it efficiently

by 350.org

Email management plays important role in your business, handle it efficiently

Email has assumed high importance in accelerating the pace of business transactions and has become a fastest medium for communication, exchange of ideas and information. With widespread use of email in handling important and sensitive transactions, email security has become one of the critical functions of email management. Email management also involves email storage, formulation of email policy, auditing and making provision of foolproof email backup and email spam filters to ensure uninterrupted availability of email facility.

There are number of email client programmes like Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook offered by Microsoft. These email management applications are offered free of cost in bundle with Internet Explorer web browser. Email client programmes allow users to customize as per their own preferences all the mails they receive or send and also provide option of email set up rules.

With ever increasing threat of spy ware and viruses on the Internet, it has become very difficult to handle security aspect of email management without adopting a proactive approach towards the issue. Email problem can be caused by your email client configuration through which you get access to your email account, or it can also arise with your account itself. It is more often difficult to pin point the real culprit.

In order to make email management efficient enough, it is necessary to adopt layered approach, deploying services of computer support technicians or hiring email support agency services.

You can get comprehensive email management support or email backup support from computer support services companies which employ well experienced computer support technicians to fix email problems at client’s end. These companies are like one stop shops and their email management support includes storage of email, access to users both at user levels and server levels and flow of mail. They also provide mobile email solutions.

By hiring expert services of email management companies you can protect your business from unlawful and malicious attacks. Email support provided by the email management services takes care of your email security through use of email spam filters, virus scanners and fixing of errors by providing mobile email solutions.

These email management services also do installation and configuration of your new email accounts and help set up free email accounts with your ISP. Their computer support technicians also activate spam blockers for prevention of adult spam. They assist you in framing email set up rules to facilitate easy access and storage.

A GMail-specific, simple, efficient way to manage email using action labels and archive labels. From the folks at www.funwithbutter.com.
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Email Compliance with ediscovery

by ontheinside new york

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.

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3 Things Businesses Need to Know About Email Compliance

by Mr_CRO

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.

www.jatheon.com – Email Compliance Odds are very high that your organization or firm is subject to some regulation on how to retain records. Some industries face stricter rules than others ie. health care organizations are governed by different rules than the financial sector as they need to adhere to HIPAA guidelines. Regulations are something that just about any organization has to deal with. However, the real challenge is to know which guidelines to adhere to and to keep up to date as they are constantly changing. Common regulations that organizations adhere to include: * The Freedom of Information Act * FDA 21 CFR Part 11 * HIPAA * SEC 17a (3, 4) * NASD Rule 3110 & NYSE Rule 440 * IDA 29.7 (Canada) * Investment Advisors Act * Sarbanes-Oxley * PIPEDA (Canada) * Gramm-Leach-Bliley * FRCP *this is not a complete list of compliance regulation for the above specified industries. Compliance How It Works Organizations form all industries or services have the daunting task of monitoring electronic messages to ensure the strict adherence to regulatory or corporate policies. Jatheons Plug n Comply™ appliances offer the ability to set policies that messages are compared to in real-time. Messages received by the archive are compared to the user created polices and any messages that violate the established policy will have a pre-determined action triggered. This action may include notifying the offender directly; notify the offenders manager, or notifying the organizations …

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Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One

by Arlette

Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One

Email management could be a company’s saving grace in today’s world of litigation and information overload. Email is now one of the most used communication systems around, over which important business decisions are often made, therefore an adequate email management system is vital to any business.

Managing one’s emails effectively could result in a much more productive work environment in terms of organization and timeliness, as well as helping with audit purposes. Furthermore, recent legislation has made it mandatory that all businesses and organizations need to be able to produce any documentation requested by the courts if legal issues arise.

Email Archiving as part of email management

Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. Administrators can maintain an archive of all the company’s email correspondence which will be easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduce the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and are not secure backups of email data.

Moreover, in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, email archiving is a must, whilst being able to access archived emails and corporate data in a matter of seconds can help realize a return on investment and therefore boost the company’s productivity.

Legislation and Regulations

Apart from the legal benefits that an email management policy presents, it is also important when dealing with inter-company issues such as harassment or dismissal charges, where critical information may have been recorded via email.

If an employee used his work email account for illicit purposes, verifying such a fact could prove to be a difficult task without an adequate email archiving system.

Email management from a legal perspective requires organizations to keep records of email documentation for a minimum period of up to five years. Such legislation includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which affects all industries and imposes severe penalties on anyone who deliberately alters or deletes documents with the intent to defraud third parties.

Even though it is a US law, SOX act is also applicable to European companies with US listings as well as to companies that do business with the US. There are other legislations that also require companies and organizations to archive emails, as well as government bodies that comply with the regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, National Archive Records Administration (NARA) and other legislative entities.

Storage & Knowledge Issues with Email Management

Managing one’s emails is not only a legal and compliance issue but also delves into the fields of storage and knowledge management. There has been a dramatic increase in storage size due to the increase in email usage over the years as well as the upsurge in attachments sent with original emails.

This increase has affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. An efficient email archiving solution stores emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings and centralizes your email records.

Furthermore, emails are automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do so without having bulky PST files stored locally.

Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for an email management policy a critical issue for any company. Managing emails through archiving allows organizations to have control over employees’ email accounts whilst ensuring regulatory and corporate compliance.

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The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

by TechShowNetwork

The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

Email has become the standard method of correspondence used by businesses sending important and sometimes confidential messages. Such sensitive information needs to be archived for possible future use in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, specific regulations as well as the company’s email compliance policies.

Email correspondence is used for both internal and external affairs therefore it is important that a copy of all emails is archived for possible future needs relating to legal, compliance and human resource issues. A company must also be in a position to respond to eDiscovery requests at short notice.

Why a company needs email archiving

Existing regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the FRCP treat emails as being equal to paper-based documents in terms of valid and legal documentation presented in a court of law and are therefore admissible during an eDiscovery request.

eDiscovery is the process of locating, securing and using documentation from a company’s archives in a legal setting, so a company must have the ability to procure the necessary documents with the confirmation that these have not been tampered with. Failure to abide by procedures could result in court fines and other financial burdens, as well as a failing reputation.

How email archiving should be implemented

For security, maintenance and resource reasons, email archives should not be archived on the mail server but should have their own localized server that is specific to the task.

Having your emails archived on a separate database ensures more protection for the archives should the server crash, as well as lightening the load on the server. When archiving is another process that the email server is meant to handle, its resources are being stretched to capacity risking poor performance in both tasks. A dedicated email server and a dedicated archiving server render the upkeep of both machines a simpler and cleaner process.

Moreover, separate backups of both servers ensure a safer environment, as by having the archived emails on a separate server, should the email server crash all is not lost since the archived emails would be accessible and easily recoverable meaning that work can be resumed from a certain point.

Email archiving compliance

In industries and countries where regulations require organizations to monitor user activity and keep audit trails, a system that records, logs and retains a database of user activity, or other secure methods such as encryption will ensure that emails have not been tampered with as this would render them inadmissible in a court of law. An auditing facility is also important for compliance purposes.

Log files and counts must prove that all emails (including their attachments) are being captured and can be searched for, found and viewed in their original format. Advising users that their emails are being recorded and archived will act as a deterrent to any abuse of the system.

Email archiving is becoming a standard practice in today’s businesses as the implementation of a successful email compliance policy could save a company a lot of time, money and resources, and provide guarantees that it is in a position to respond to eDiscovery processes and fulfil the requirements of compliance regulation which the company must adhere to.

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