Organising enterprise e-mail
Dana Norton
Published: 14 Jun 2002 23:30 BST
Most IT managers have already fielded calls from users who have lost an important e-mail. But the next call that comes in may be from the legal department with concerns about the fact that e-mail has become a litigation tool.
Jeff Morris, a product line manager with Sendmail, Inc., said archiving has become a critical process because "...e-mail's the thing that everybody is going to find." He points to e-mails from Bill Gates that were admitted as evidence in Microsoft's antitrust litigation as examples.
When you think about it, e-mail is not only key to possible litigation, it is also a vital part of an organisation's corporate record. E-mail that flows through your system may contain important and sensitive information about organisational plans and processes. For this reason, it's important to copy, filter, and store certain types of e-mail for future reference by users or to meet a variety of legal requirements.
Storing e-mails is part of a process called archiving, a strategy that is gaining acceptance as a way to protect an organisation from liability issues. Archiving copies selected e-mails flowing through an organisation and stores that information in a secure location for retrieval when it is needed, either as part of a legal process or simply because a user wants to recover an e-mail that was inadvertently deleted.
Backups are the key
We all know the frustration attached to deleting an e-mail that explains a particular organisational process or contains key information.
Archiving e-mail is one way to end this frustration, but only if you back up e-mails on a regular basis. Morris said running a regularly scheduled backup is the first step IT managers should take when creating an e-mail archive.
Many organisations use software that can automatically run backups at midnight or during other off-peak times.
"It should be an automatic process, and the smart, conscientious folks are doing it regularly. But we've seen a number of cases where backups are not run as frequently as they arguably should be," he said.
What should you archive?
The second step to archiving e-mail is to determine what e-mails you want to capture. Is your company more concerned with communication between in-house users or e-mails between a user and an outside party? Or is the need a mixture of both?
In other words, it's not likely that an organisation will keep e-mails between two brokers discussing where to eat lunch. But e-mails between a broker and a customer about what stocks a customer should buy or sell is something that an organisation will want to keep.
The decision on which e-mails should be captured also depends on the particular needs of the organisation and the industry in which it operates. For example, communication between a broker and a customer may be of interest to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
"The SEC requires organisations to archive messages that could be a potential violation of their policy," said Joe Fisher, who manages the product line at Tumbleweed Communications, a provider of software solutions for managing secure Internet communication and collaboration.
Currently, SEC policies require brokers or their organisations to save all electronic communications they've had with customers. The length of time brokers must retain a record depends upon its type. For example, firms must keep securities purchase and sales information for at least six years. Copies of confirmations of these actions must be kept for three years.
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