Email archiving for US educational institutions
Email is an enormous repository of information and the millions of emails sent and received daily, often of a confidential nature, contain a wealth of knowledge that needs to be safeguarded.
The information in emails is of such value that in December 2006, the Supreme Court in the United States made changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the rules that dictate what happens in federal civil cases and how discovery of information and materials relevant to civil cases is conducted. These amendments are significant; for the first time, all electronically stored information, including email, is subject to legal discovery.
What does that mean? It means that federal agencies, courts and attorneys may request electronically stored information that is of relevance to court litigation or forensic investigations. Failure on the part of any organization whether a business, city government, or educational institution, to provide the information, in whole or in part, could result in court sanctions, fines and loss of grants and/or federal funding.
Following the changes to the FRCP in 2006, educational institutions have been required to think about how and where they store digital information. As with the majority of organizations, educational institutions are ever more dependent on communication technologies for their day to day activities. Email is used to communicate with students, between members of staff, to members of various oversight committees and local, state and federal agencies and authorities.
Educational institutions, like businesses and government agencies, need to be prepared to collect and present any duly authorized request for information, within a short time frame. A common misconception about email archiving is that the institution's backup policy suffices for the requirement. While backups are indeed extremely important, especially if you are an administrator who suddenly had to rebuild a server after hardware failure, they are sadly deficient when it comes to email retrieval. Consider an email conversation that goes back months if not years, and imagine your IT administrator wading through all of that email data to find relevant bits of information. Contrast that with an email archiving solution wherein entire threads can be retrieved with a few clicks.
There are other benefits
Access to old or deleted emails
Educators do not have direct access to backups but with an email archiving solution, they can search for old or deleted email using a web browser or directly from the Outlook client.
Storage problems
As educators send and receive more emails with larger attachments, they find themselves requesting ever more storage space on the server. If they use PST files stored on their local machine, administrators have the problem of an unmanaged local disk drive to deal with. Low storage levels, suffering email servers, problematic PST files, and a frustrated educator waiting for his or her inbox to be restored after hitting the delete button by mistake are signs that email archiving is a must for the instution.
Ability to manage an educator's email
While not something that we like to think of, there may be a time when it becomes necessary to monitor the communication generated by educators or administrators at the institution. With an email archiving solution this is available.
An informal survey by eSchool News last year found that 80% of school administrators were unclear about their district's policies for the retention of email. Although many were aware of the amendments to Federal law, 90% said they had yet to initiate activities to comply with the regulations. Is your educational institution ready?
Perhaps it's time to seriously consider email archiving. Download GFI MailArchiver™ and see for yourself the benefit it brings.
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