Storage Toolkit

Data jail lacks key

Mark Hollands, Technology & Business Magazine Australia ZDNet Australia

Published: 24 May 2004 11:30 BST

Delete mail, go to jail
Yet companies are reluctant to press the "delete" button for fear of breaching new corporate regulations aimed at stopping horror episodes such as the HIH and OneTel collapses, which were in large part due to a lack of corporate accountability and governance.

The Corporations Law Economic Reform Policy -- Australia's toned-down version of the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act -- has chief executives demanding that every scrap of data is kept just in case something bad happens and an auditor from the Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC) takes the lift up to their office.

"The Australian legislation is a more principled approach than the prescriptive stand taken in America," says Hughes. "However, there remains an obligation to not just report the financial figures accurately but to show the substance behind those figures. Email threads discussing ways in which fiscal results should be reported would be covered by the legislation." This means almost all corporate emails are now captured and stored because this is the medium where so much management and decision-making is conducted. IT research specialist Gartner claims 35 percent of any large company's "know-how" resides on email.