Article - Why Bother With Email Archiving?

All the hype is around email these days, so what exactly is email archiving and why should you worry about it?  Email archiving is a systematic approach to saving and protecting the data contained in email messages so it can be accessed quickly at a later date. It is not good policy to treat backups made for disaster recovery as archives.  In addition, it should be stated that native email systems have little or no retention management functionality.  In the past, organizations often relied on end users to maintain their own individual email archives. The IT department would back up email, but not in a manner that made messages searchable. If a specific email needed to be traced, it often took weeks to find it. With today's compliance legislation and legal discovery rules, it has become necessary for IT departments to manage the entire email archiving in bulk so specific messages can be located in minutes, not weeks. If you work in IT you are most likely grappling with how to manage email and file stores that are growing exponentially. New discovery and privacy requirements are forcing you to both know what you have and retrieve it very quickly.  When it comes to email archiving practices, there is no shortage of advice. The trouble is, the guidance available typically is conflicting information.  Even within one organization, perspectives on email management can vary widely. The legal department sees email as important to formulating its discovery response strategy.  The IT department has storage and security concerns. The compliance people have preservation and control issues. Finally, the end users want better access to email to improve productivity. Reconciling the needs of all these constituencies makes it clear that one size seldom fits all in the world of email. It is important to recognize the need for technology investment in the area of email archiving because email retention and storage is expensive. Some experts estimate that administrators spend as much as six hours per week recovering old messages for users. In addition, responding to legal discovery can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. When emails exist on user hard drives, the process is even more costly. Within regulated industries and those subject to investigation or audit, cost justification is relatively simple. Any technology solution must provide a secure repository, metadata collection, and granular message management from creation to final disposition. Equally important is the ability to capture contextual information about a message such as routing, threads, links, embedded items and attachments. Preservation of messages for long periods, the ability to override destruction when necessary, and navigation, search and retrieval functionality are vital needs. Options include systems specialized for email, outsourced email vaulting, and products designed to manage enterprise content. Resist the urge to either save everything or print and file. Although appealing in simplicity and possibly defensible on the basis of cost to implement, neither is good policy. While storage is cheap, the cost to review everything at discovery is not.  Printing and filing paper copies not only impairs the context for understanding the message exchange, but also loses embedded items, delivery confirmations and other valuable information in the process. Email archiving does not lend itself to the "just get it off my desk" school of problem solving. As with so many other compliance issues these days, email archiving is less likely to be a project with a definite start, middle, end, and more likely to be part of an ongoing program aimed at realistic control. Emerging standards and influential organizations recognize that all records, including email, instant messages, and phone text originate as part of business processes. Monitoring, filtering, encryption, collection, management, and preservation should be an automatic part of those processes.