3 Reasons to Archive Email

Compliance, capacity management and e-policy enforcement. Which factors are driving email archiving at your organization? And how do you pick a solution that solves your specific problems without breaking the bank? There are many internal and external forces driving the need to archive. If you are a registered securities dealer or broker, you have to archive all electronic communications of licensed professionals. If your company has grown rapidly in recent years, you may be reaching the high end of mailbox storage limits and your Exchange server is no longer at a manageable size. If you work in a regulated industry, it may be company policy to save emails that could later be used as evidence in court. This white paper:

- Examines some of the drivers for archiving
- Explores the internal and external influences on email archiving
- Reveals some ideas to tackle your most important problems
- Discusses some of the requirements of current legislation
- Looks at some solutions to the various needs
- Looks at issues raised by archiving

Drivers to Archive

Three basic requirements are commonly expressed when email administrators are asked about their needs for archiving. These being:

- To aid the organization in meeting legal requirements (Compliance)
- To improve system performance (Capacity)
- To manage the retention of corporate information (e-Policy)

When we ask administrators for their key requirements within each of these areas, their answers generally cover the following. Your organization is probably no exception.

Compliance

- Assist compliance with regulatory requirements
- Reduce the legal risks associated with emails
- Improve the awareness to the organization of legal exposure
- Ability to store, search and retrieve emails
- Enable secure and audited trails of email activity

Capacity

- Improve the email system performance
- Reduce mailbox and information store size
- Meet and improve Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
- Reduce back-up/restore times
- Integrate with storage and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy

e-Policy

- Enforce company e-Policy to retain and / or delete email
- Reduce legal exposure
- Tailor retention policies to organizational needs
- Analyze email and take centralized decisions and actions

Unfortunately, in practice, the solution to one requirement may be in direct conflict to the aims of another. This is because the business requirements often differ hugely from the IT drivers; even the IT infrastructure requirements can conflict with each other. So, let us examine some of these influences.

Compliance

The need for ?compliance' is driven by various governmental and regulatory demands. The high profile acts of today include SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II which were primarily driven by experiences of email mismanagement. The UK and US Freedom of Information Act laws have increased the visibility of email retention and accessibility during 2005. Legislation commonly calls for retention periods but may demand deletion following expiration of the retention period. The requirement is usually to copy away all emails relating to subjects, departments or individuals before a user has a chance to manipulate or delete the information, providing a fully secure and audited record of email activity. System performance and selective retention have nothing to do with compliance; a solution to aid compliance is generally working behind the scenes, invisible to the end-user and with the archived copies accessible only by certain permitted Officers.

Regulations are requiring various industries to store electronic information for a period of time. These new standards are pushing the need to archive.

Typical regulations force organizations to:

- Keep copies of all emails (selected by individual or department)
- Keep copies of all email transactions with third parties
- Maintain copies of the electronic calendars of key members of staff
- Save messages in a secure format, able to be retrieved as and when they are needed

Non-compliance with regulations is serious. In December 2002, The Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Stock Exchange and NASD fined five firms a total of $8.25 million for failure to preserve email communications.