Gearing up your business for eDiscovery and email compliance

Email has become the standard for both internal communication and to engage in business affairs with outside partners, suppliers, clients and others. Your company's email contains important, and sometimes confidential, information that needs to be archived for possible future need.

There are a number of serious reasons for implementing an email compliance policy for your small to medium sized business. Email is often the only form of written communication that exists between a you and your suppliers, your partners, your clients and prospective clients. It is important, for many reasons, that a copy of this correspondence is retained, not the least of which is to ensure that the company fulfils the requirements of email compliance regulations and to be in a position to respond to legal issues such as eDiscovery requests at short notice. Of course, email is the backbone of internal correspondence between staff members and as such, may also need to be referred to at a later date and could possibly require regular monitoring.

Why your company needs email archiving

Existing regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the FRCP treat email as equal to paper-based documents in terms of being valid and admissible documentation in a court of law. Such documentation can be, and is often, requested by attorneys or courts in the form of an eDiscovery request. eDiscovery is the process of locating, securing and using documentation from a company's archives in a legal setting. You can see that the ability to easily locate specific email with the secure knowledge that it hasn't been tampered with is now critical. Companies now need to invest in an easy to manage email archive. Failure to abide by regulations could result in court fines and/or loss in court battle, as well as a damaged reputation.

Your company must implement an email compliance policy with particular attention to email archiving. Fortunately it's easier that it sounds. First you must draw up a suitable policy according to your company's needs and likely exposure based on the regulations and then purchase a product to support your policy automatically.

The best way to implement email archiving

Email archives should have their own localized server that is specific to its task.

Having your emails archived to a separate database, as opposed to using local disk space or eating up space on the email server, ensures better security against tampering; easier maintenance; more protection in the case of a server failure, and less load on the your mail server, so faster mail service. Use your email server for filtering emails; don't bog it down with archiving, risking overloads that lead to delas and crashes.

Moreover, separate backups of both servers ensure a safer environment and minimize the risk of loss of all the data should a backup fail to work. By having the archived emails to a separate server, if the primary email server crashes, you have the power to recover to a given point in time and begin to work again from there. The retrieval of emails to that point will be a lot simpler and quicker, making the resumption of work relatively hassle-free for administrators.

A dedicated email server and a seperate and dedicated archiving server renders the upkeep of both machines simpler, more secure, and in the long run will turn out to be better resource allocation.

Email archiving for compliance

A system with built-in auditing capability, such as recording, logging and the retention of database and user activity, or other built-in secure methods such as encryption, will go a long way toward ensuring that the email has not been tampered with. This is particularly important in industries and countries where regulations require organizations to monitor user activity and keep audit trails of activity. In any environment it is important to have an email compliance archive that is easily searchable, so that email can be retrieved quickly upon demand.

An email archive that is cumbersome to administer will quickly become more of a problem than a solution.Email archive systems need to be easily auditable for compliance purposes. Log files and counts need to be maintained as proof of all actions taken relating to the email compliance archive. Logs must prove that all email is being captured and that all emails (including their attachments) can be searched for, found and viewed in their original format.

*It is important to advise users that their email is being recorded and archived.

Email archiving is becoming a standard practice in today's businesses. The implementation of a successful email compliance policy could save your company a lot of time, money and resources under the pressure of eDiscovery requests. The right system will guarantee that you are in a position to respond and that your company is in compliance with all email regulation.

Email archiving software such a s GFI MailArchiver for Exchange™ will help your business to be ready to respond in a time of need.