Why Organizations Need to Archive Email

The corporate value of email

Over the past years, email has become a primary channel of business communication. It provides organizations with a fast medium of conveying business correspondence such as purchase orders, quotations and sales transactions, in virtually any geographical area with the least physical effort possible. A study conducted by market researcher Gartner Group revealed that Organizations conduct almost 97% of their communications via emails. Furthermore in a recent survey, Osterman Research found that email is now accepted as written confirmation of approvals or orders in 79% of organizations.

Since emails have become the electronic substitutes of legal business documentation, the information being passed on through this electronic correspondence constitutes a record. Consequently, such correspondence must be retained for a minimum period of time, often established by statutes. Due to email predominance in the business industry, various pieces of legislations have been enacted to protect personal privacy, enforce corporate governance standards and maintain ethical conduct. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Gramm-Leach Bliley act (GLBA) and the Freedom of information act (FOIA) are some examples of such regulations.

What is the 'true' meaning of email archiving?

An email archive is a repository generally kept in a non-productive environment to provide secure preservation of email for compliance and operational purposes. A 'true' email archiving system automatically extracts message contents and attachments from incoming/outgoing emails and after indexing, it stores them in read-only format. This ensures that archived records are maintained in their original state.

Email archiving moderates the demand for storage space by reducing the amount of online emails on the mail server. Moreover email archives consume less physical storage space than other email storage methods.

The active approach adopted by email archiving solutions ensures that the company has a centralized and accessible copy of all its email. This provides additional protection against accidental or intentional deletion of emails by end users. Email archiving also eliminates the need to search for personal archives on each and every local machine whenever litigation support is requested.

A study by Osterman Research states that 46% of the companies make use of tape backups to 'archive' their emails. It must be noted that 'backup' and 'archival' storage serve two different purposes. Backups are intended to save current data against the event of failure or disaster whilst archives protect data so that it can be accessed when needed. The cost of finding the electronic records for a discovery process can be astronomical, requiring months of IT manpower to wade through backup tapes. Email archiving systems provide advanced search and retrieval functions. These allow users to track down email messages in a timely and cost effective manner. Without an effective email archiving system, finding an email record is worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack. In Murphy Oil USA vs. Flour Daniel, the defendant was ordered to restore and print the emails contained in 93 tape backups and to absorb the total costs involved to perform this operation which amount to $6.2 million.

Email archiving solutions allow administrators to setup access restrictions. These restrictions secure and protect intellectual property rights as well as ensure data integrity and confidentiality in compliance to the statutes.

What are the primary reasons to archive email?

There are four predominant reasons for an organization to archive its email. These are: Compliance, litigation support, storage management and knowledge management.

Compliance

The new regulatory environment is one of the major drivers behind the increase in demand for email archiving solutions. It is estimated that over 10,000 compliance regulations have been enacted around the world. More stringent controls and severe penalties are forcing organizations to address regulatory compliance more seriously. In March 2004, Bank of America was fined $10 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for failing to retain email records for the time stipulated by the regulation and for failing to submit the information requested by SEC in a timely manner.

Although the data subject to regulatory statutes varies by industry, all records that pertain to the organization's business activity are subject to compliance regulations. These include employee and client records, correspondence between organizations and financial documentation.