Billions of emails being sent every day and the number increasing daily, and critical business processes like sales orders, customer service etc. have made email a necessity. Email compliance is something organizations need to seriously consider as there has been a surge in government regulations that make it mandatory for large and small businesses alike to include: protection of customer information, corporate governance, law enforcement investigations and to ensure that email is used and managed properly. The consequences of not complying can be serious as organizations will have to deal with penalties, litigations, HR problems and damage to companies’ reputations..
The United States’ Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) demand certain industries and publicly traded companies comply with a framework of legislation relevant to email around the IT security pillars of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Email is treated as equal to paper documents and is admissible in a court of law. These documents can be requested by the courts or attorneys in the form of an eDiscovery request.
Compliance has the ability to vastly improve business operations and is ultimately in a corporation’s best interest. Managing risk, streamlining processes and standardizing data management are just a few of the benefits of compliance efforts.
Manage Email â Organizations that fall under industry or government regulations need much more protection than just the regular backing up of email on a disk. The disadvantage of this is that daily backups are run at the end of the work day, so any emails that employees delete during the day won’t be stored. Your organization’s email contains confidential and important information and needs to be archived for future reference. Email archiving uses automated journaling to capture all emails and immediately archive them on a separate server. The e-mail in the data folder can be encrypted and compressed so that they cannot be changed or altered and also, less file space is needed. This not only protects vital corporate data from deletion but also can limit employee access to archived data. With email archiving, employee activity can be tracked, thus making the system more secure.
Data Management â Storage can be an issue due to insufficient data management. Apart from official mail, there is lots of junk mail and personal mail floating around. If this mail is not sorted out, your storage devices can overflow pretty quickly. The easiest answer is to use an email archiving solution with built-in mail filtering capabilities. This way only relevant mail will be archived.
Standard Practices â Just like you have proper policy guidelines and rules for other organizational functions, organizations must also implement standardized email compliance practices that adhere to industry or government regulatory compliance requirements. Once a policy is implemented, it is important to advise your users that you have an e-mail compliance archive which captures all incoming and outgoing email irrespective of whether they are internal or external.
Users need to be aware of their access rights to their email in the email compliance archive. This will make users aware that only systems administrators or similarly privileged users can view all or any e-mails together with attachments in the email compliance data base and this awareness can act as a deterrent to email abuse.
Implementing a successful email compliance policy can save you time, money and resources in case of an e-Discovery request or litigation. The right email compliance policy guidelines need not be costly if implemented in the right way. It should run smoothly in the background without hindering your day to day functioning.
It’s Time to Take Email Archiving & Security Seriously
With email having quietly matured into one of today’s most mission critical applications, could it be time to start taking its management, maintenance, and security rather more seriously?
As cultural phenomena go, the story of email’s emergence as the world’s undisputed champion of personal and business communication is about as impressive as any. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that there was a time not all that long ago, when deploying email was still considered a pretty big deal; when email meant specialist employee training; when half a dozen messages a day was a lot; when only the most senior management in a business could expect their own dedicated email accounts. How times change. Driven by all manner of market factors – server, storage, and software costs falling, the rise of always-on connectivity, teleworking, webmail, and mobile email to name just a handful – a robust, reliable, secure email solution is now nothing short of absolutely business critical. Indeed, issues such as email management, archiving, storage, and security now affect – or should affect – every company from SME to Enterprise, says Neil Hammerton, former CEO and founder of Email Systems, and currently VP of SaaS Development at Webroot. There are many drivers for this, he says. The need for information to be easily accessible where and whenever it’s required; Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II, which are driving archiving from a regulatory compliance perspective and which, in turn, are having a filterdown effect to businesses that don’t necessarily need to be compliant, but wish to employ best practice.
The threat of data loss is a further key factor, with industry reports indicating that 85% or more of a company’s intellectual property now passes through its email, according to Hammerton. “Businesses are conducting more and more legal transactions including quotes, orders, confirmations, and agreements via email”, confirms Duncan Ash, EMEA Business Development Manager with Sybase. “To protect both the organisation and its customers, these emails have to meet stringent statutory requirements governing document authenticity, confidentiality, and availability.”
Worryingly though, it appears that a disturbingly low number of UK businesses can be confident as regards the integrity of their email systems currently. In a recent study conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Forensic & Compliance Systems (FCS), nearly half the businesses surveyed (44%) couldn’t prove email hadn’t been changed or tampered with, and more than a third (35%) were unsure whether any changes had taken place or not; results that suggest that three in four UK businesses have millions of emails floating around their synapses that would enjoy no legal standing. It uncovers a worrying reality, said Ralph Harvey, CEO at FCS. Specifically that many firms simply don’t “understand the consequences of not having a tighter control over their emails…” It’s a problem businesses simply have to address, counsels Steve Tongish, marketing director EMEA at Plasmon. “European regulations are now developing teeth. There have been recent court cases in both the UK and Germany where steep fines have been imposed when the process controlling records and the integrity of data was found to be inadequate.” This shift in risk exposure, he says, is forcing a rethink in digital archive requirements.
Malcolm Etchells is VP Europe for Waterford Technologies – a provider of solutions that allow the visualisation of email usage, data pattern analysis, and policy improvement and enforcement. He also bangs the compliance drum, citing several costly cases. “Some of the world’s largest, most IT savvy organisations – UBS Warburg, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley – have fallen foul”, he says. “(Businesses) must begin to think more proactively about how to archive, retrieve, and produce emails and related content in the event of a request from a regulatory or government body.” “… the issue is not storing the emails – that’s relatively easy – but finding and retrieving (them). Many organisations can show authorities the email in the system but can’t retrieve it. A well-publicised example is Morgan Stanley which has been fined repeatedly because of its inability to retrieve emails, with two fines of million and .5 million respectively.”
Ash warns, that there is a “conflict” between the need for strong record maintenance and data privacy law however. For example, he explains, confidential data mustn’t be kept in archives accessible to supervisory bodies, and personal emails cannot be stored without the agreement of both sender and recipient. There are pressing productivity concerns too. First, says Ash, if email is filed in an unstructured way, it’s impossible to fully exploit the information contained within it. Second, with knowledge increasingly available only within emails, companies need a way to store, access, and analyse this precious data efficiently. And a ‘save all emails’ strategy is clearly not the answer, he says. Separating what can and can’t be stored calls for sophisticated technologies. “Most specialised email archiving solutions are based on file-oriented data management systems. These are neither audit-secure, nor able to conduct a combined analysis of structured and unstructured information.”
Etchells cites further productivity concerns. According to the Office of National Statistics, he says, employees spend an average of two hours a day assessing, managing, and responding to email, which equates to 55 days a year or 11 working weeks for every email user. Translated into costs, the figures are alarming. Based on an organisation with 1,000 employees earning an average of £25,000p.a., for instance, each spending 1 minute per inbound email on an average of 40 messages per day, and a further 4 minutes creating and sending each of around 20 emails every day, the estimated cost to the business over the course of a year would be £7.5million. And that’s without the cost of email misuse and storage. So what’s the answer? Says Etchells: “Productivity is very much seen as an issue for the IT department but it cannot be held responsible for reducing the volume of email sent by, or within, an organisation. Even with adequate storage in place, creating a culture of efficient and responsible email use needs to be driven by the business, not IT.”
Urs Raas, Senior Product Manager at enterprise content management (ECM) software vendor, Tower Software offers some practical first steps. “First you need a system that can automatically move mail into an archive that uses cheap storage and is easy to maintain from a back-up and disaster recovery point of view. Second you need a system that allows the easy capture of emails into the context of the business process, alongside any other records documenting it. This is where email archiving meets compliance.”
Michael Brooke, Archive Manager Product specialist at Quest Software argues that a solution must also reduce the total volume of information stored, and not simply move the problem from a mail store to another media. “80% of email volume is attachment data and in most organisations the duplication rate of attachment data is close to 50%. I.e. 50% of the attachment storage used by a Mail server is duplicate data!” He cites easy administration and cultural ignorance as other growing issues. “IT staff are busy people and an archiving solution that requires significant management time becomes a liability.” “IT staff know that storage is not unlimited but the business doesn’t, so the IT manager is often left explaining to senior management why the legal department can’t have a 10GB mailbox. They aren’t interested in the back-ups and recovery, what if a disputed contract they sent 2 years ago is no longer retrievable?”
Implemented properly, says Etchells, the benefits can be huge. “Having an intelligent email management solution in place will provide (an) insight into email usage, especially the patterns that cause waste.” It can also help identify and eliminate non-work related email, he says, and even change the way employees create, manage, and think about email.
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www.jatheon.com – Why Archive Email? Jatheon Plug n Comply appliance is a complete solution that allows organization to comply with government regulation with a simple, secure and integrated product. Plug n Comply is the industry leading appliance that effectively captures, indexes and stores all email and instant messaging enabling you to enhance email management and achieve regulatory compliance needs. Maintaining a sole record or email communication is mission critical to business today. In addition companies must be prepared act quickly in the case of litigation or compliance regulations. Jatheons email archiving solutions are being used by companies all over the world across all industries. Whether it be law firms, banks, insurance companies, engineering firms, health care agencies, and municipal and federal agencies, all companies no matter what the size, see a need for the Jatheon email archiving solution. The Jatheon solution helps organizations meet their storage space management, compliance, legal discovery, mail platform migration and policy management requirements. Overall, Jatheon offers a comprehensive, cost effective and easy to deploy archiving appliance that requires minimal IT support and simple management of corporate data, making it a suitable solution for companies of all sizes. Jatheons email archiving appliance has a number of different ROI characteristics that make the decision making process a relatively easy one. * Reduced overall capital …
Now-a-days Email plays an important role in business. With the help of email we can schedule meetings, assign tasks, answer questions, receive product orders, check progress and exchange friendly greetings even communicate among customers, employees and business partners. But they open the door to a virus that downs the entire system. The most common way to get a computer virus is via an email attachment. Viruses can attack network resources such as servers and routers. Threats attack on the internet in the form of spy ware, ad ware and computer viruses cause concern to many small business owners.
Larger organizations still place the responsibility of managing their email systems on already overburdened and under-budgeted IT departments. They provide many service of email management. The best service will always make certain that your email campaigns are protected by the best and latest in anti-spam and delivery technology. Email management services will have strict anti spam regulations for its users. Email management services should be available 24 hours a day to offer any type of technical help. There are many tools that provide anti-virus protection for desktops at the workplace. Most anti-virus software is good at detecting viral.
Fiverivers IT Solutions offer you the expertise and technology to wipe out email intrusion for good. Fiverivers provides a wide range of services to help your business reach its desired goals and objectives. We can manage your email system and ensure you’ll get a reliable system with support from us. Therefore, an email list management service will be 100% CAN-SPAM compliant, as well as offer high email deliverability.
Services which Five Rivers provides:
Email threat protection
Fiverivers provides e-mail’s spam filter which helps in catching unwanted emails. Fiverivers services adjust them over time to minimize the spam that you receive. These spam directly to the trash – meaning that you don’t waste your time reading and deleting it.
Install anti-virus system
Every day we get bulk emails that take our time as well as block the resources of our computer and email clients. The only way to get protected from this problem is to install an anti solution spam that will give you Fiverivers. Fiverivers IT Support email management service that your email campaigns are protected by the best and latest in anti-spam and delivery technology.
Email Policy Management and Encryption
Fiverivers apply content and attachment filters. Fiverivers Email management starts with setting up and using filters. They control user access to personal quarantines and settings. Apply these and other policies company-wide, or just to groups or individuals.
Remote email access from anywhere in the world
Fiverivers provide Remote Email Access service that gives the user the ability to access, receive and send emails in any location. You can access your copy of Outlook simply and easily via the web with safety.
I hope these email management services helped you discover what you need to look for in email list management services. Make sure you’re using these Fiverivers email management services smartly. For a very affordable email list management service Visit www.fiveriverssupport.com
Fiverivers offer a diverse range of both network and system services ensuring that the potential of your IT infrastructure is maximized. For more details visit the website http://www.fiveriverssupport.com
Email archival refers to the process of organizing your electronic mail into a more manageable and easily retrieved system. With the use of e-mail archiving, you will be able to have an easier time finding your mail with just one click of a button.
This system has been around in recent years because software manufacturers had found the need to have a system wherein you can easily retrieve your email without the trouble of looking into your email list for long periods of time.
With email archival, you can now search for your necessary emails by way of encoding the dates and specific file names of any electronic mail that you would want to read. In addition to this, you can now arrange your emails with all the old features intact. You can still determining if you have a new e-mail coming in through email archival.
There are also a few advantages to using email archival for your system. It will give you faster service in terms of retrieving your mail as mentioned earlier. It also allows you to get more work done because of the efficiency of the system.
With email archival you would not have to go through thousands of mails one by one to try and find the one specific e-mail that you need in order to get the job done. Aside from this, you would also have more space for other data in your system because an e-mail archival program will organize all your data into an allotted space so that it can accommodate more information in terms of memory.
You will also have the advantage of having an efficient system that you can rely on when it comes to receiving and organizing all your messages. It would be like having your own personal secretary if you have an e-mail archival system in your computer.
In addition to this, it will add to your efficiency as an employee or as a business executive because of the speed and accuracy that it would bring in terms of the data retrieval and organization.
These are just some of the advantages that you will have once you get an email archival system for your computer. You will not have any problems with the slow retrieval and viewing of any electronic mail once you have an efficient e-mail archiving system for your business needs.
With the many advantages of email archival, there are also some minor disadvantages that you have to watch out for when it comes to these kinds of online services. Here are some tips that you can use to make sure that you have the best service you can get from an e-mail archiving system.
First you have to make sure that this is a licensed program where you can have all the benefits of the archiving system without the hassle of having to deal with unlawful elements.
Secondly you have to be sure that it has all the security features that you will need to keep your email safe and away from any and all elements that may have negative interests with your emails. By doing this, you would keep your corresponding as private as you can protect it from hackers that can derive pertinent information from your emails.
Aside from strengthening your password, you have to make sure that your archiving system has all the security features that are necessary for your safety. Do not be afraid to contact your service provider to find out if the said program can cater to your needs- security wise.
In addition to this, you have to be very vigilant about who you correspond with. Any person who has direct contact with you can be a suspect whenever you have lost important information from your email. For this reason, you have to really know who you are constantly in contact with, so that you will have fewer problems with unscrupulous entities who just want to take all the information that they can get from you.
Here is some of the important information that you have to really keep safe.
Financial records
Passwords
Personal data
This is why some of the email senders tend to be a bit formal when sending an e-mail because they would not want to share too much information via the web. At present, it is very easy to hack into e-mail addresses and gather information even if you do not have proper authorization to do so.
This is why email archival is important. You will not only give you a sense of security but will also keep you organized and free from the additional hassles of your professional life. If you have this program, you would never forget to answer another e-mail again.
Tangent Inc is a leading computer solutions company that professes in providing innovative technologies like all in one PC, medical computer and solutions like Email archival programs to businesses worldwide.
Resolve all your Computing Problems with Email Archiving and Other Innovative Solutions
Business communication, today, takes place through emails and this has been accepted as the legal way to communicate today. Having said that, it is necessary to add that communication through email is required to be stored and maintained as record, like any other kind of communication, for the required statutory period, such that it may be retrieved, if required for future reference. Given this need for storing and retrieving emails, computer solutions firms have developed the technique of email archiving, which is nothing but a technique where the system automatically extracts and stores messages and attachments that are either sent to or from the system in a read only format, which can be accessed in the future, when the need arises.
The best part of this system is that it creates more space on the server and as they are stored in a compressed format on your disk, it also ends up saving a lot of space on your disk as well. Moreover, email archiving allows for emails to be stored in the exact manner in which they were sent or received, thereby adding credibility to the document, especially if you require using them in any Court of law as evidence.
Archiving of emails can be done either through in house archiving or by hiring the services of a hosting solutions company. In house archiving would mean that you invest in a good server or even an all in one PC which can easily archive and retrieve your own emails. Although this method is definitely more secure than hiring the services of an outsider company, the cost of such systems could be more than the cost of hiring external services and therefore, you should consider your budget before finally deciding.
Hiring external services means that you are allowing your data to be held and retrieved by external agents. Advantages of such email archiving services include the fact that they are low cost, both upfront as well as running and that they are easily implementable. However, on the other hand, it could mean that you compromise confidentiality while spending more time on retrieval.
There are several reasons for email archiving, chief of which are knowledge management, storage management, litigation and compliance. It is pertinent to note that emails are often referred to as the knowledge repository of any business and therefore, if you want to maintain and pass on this knowledge to the newer generation, then it is essential to archive the same in a way that it can be easily retrieved. While on the issue of knowledge management, it is essential to add that various areas of business require different kinds of knowledge management and therefore, technology must be developed and used to ensure proper management and retrieval of knowledge. For example, in healthcare, it is often necessary to be up to date with the latest medical conditions as well as the latest reports of any patient in question and this can be easily done with the help of a medical computer, which is nothing but a resource tool that is highly useful for the healthcare industry.
The second reason for email archiving is storage management, which is the absolute need of the hour. In other words, if your business has been going for generations, chances are that you are absolutely flooded with emails that require archiving. Allowing your emails to stay on the mail server will only occupy space that can otherwise be allotted to newer mails and communication. Therefore, archiving firstly allows you to free space on the mail server. Secondly, mails that are archived are often compressed, such that they occupy very little space, which in other words means that they do not occupy much space on your server either, making this technology highly useful for your business. In the medical field, through the use of a medical computer or an all in one PC, information can easily be stored and retrieved, which if stored naturally in individual files, would not only occupy more space literally but would also be very difficult to retrieve. Therefore, archiving of data and emails allows for easy storage and retrieval, as and when required.
Thirdly, it is a well known fact today that emails are considered legal forms of communication and therefore, if you are ever in any kind of litigation and require to produce evidence, email archiving will not only help retrieve it immediately but will ensure that the communication is presented in the original format, thereby adding to its authenticity. Similarly, in the healthcare industry, medical computer or all in one PC are used for retrieving medical data, which may be required for litigation or even instant diagnosis.
Lastly, email archiving is absolutely essential for compliance to the law, which essentially involves three aspects, namely, retention of data in its original state, protection of data from unauthorized access and auditability of data, which includes easy retrieval of data, when required despite it being protected.
Tangent Inc is a leading computer solutions company that professes in providing innovative technologies like all in one PC, medical computer and solutions like Email archiving to businesses worldwide.
Several years ago, email archiving was a hot topic as the new rules of discovery prompted everyone to look at how they would produce the appropriate email documents in the event of a lawsuit. Interest in archivers has resurfaced, but this time customers are looking at these devices as a solution to reducing out-of-control data stores.
The Challenge
Just as traditional data stores continue to grow, so do our email stores. It seems like an overnight explosion! But as anyone who has tried to implement an email store reduction policy knows, getting end-users to give up the items they have retained is almost impossible. Blame ENRON if you like, but people are more aware than ever that they may need to produce documentation to safeguard themselves. And in this day and age, who can blame them?
Enter the Email Archiver
More and more customers are contacting us to review the current email archiving solutions available for GroupWise. They want to use this technology as a way to reduce their data stores while giving end-users the comfort of knowing that they can retrieve a given message any time they need it. Here are a few important questions to ask as you consider the most popular GroupWise email archiving solutions on the market:
* How are you going to use the archiver? If you are simply going to use the archiver to be sure that all messages are archived per your data retention policies, any archiver compatible with GroupWise can achieve this goal – particularly if you don’t anticipate your end-users going back to the archive on a regular basis to look for messages.
* Does the archiving solution maintain the folder structure of the end-user’s mailbox? Not all archivers will do this. However, if your end-users will be looking for old messages on a regular basis, they will want to see the familiar folder structure they use every day. A search function to find the messages is not enough.
* Does the archiver support stubbing? Stubbing is a really important feature if you are looking to convince your end-users that archiving is a good thing. Stubbing allows the message subject and the first few lines of an email to appear in the end-user’s live mailbox. The result? For the end-user, nothing seems to have disappeared from their mailbox, even though technically the emails have been archived!
* Are you going to be pulling mail from traditional GroupWise archives? Again, not all archivers support this functionality. If you are not only trying to reduce your live message store but also the data stores of archive files, you need to be sure that you pick an archiver that can seamlessly accommodate this function. If not, you will have to unarchive the messages back to the live message store, archive them to the archiver, and then reduce the message store.
* How much data are you planning to archive? Make sure that your archiver is not undersized and that you can easily add storage if necessary. Many archivers support NAS, SAN, or Windows file share targets. How much space you need is completely dependent on the retention policies of your organization. A rule of thumb? Plan for growth, and then work on getting buy-in from the powers that be to prune this data at some point after the archiver is in place.
Conclusion
Email archivers are a great way to reduce live message stores without getting end-users to commit to completely getting rid of data they want to retain. And remember, reducing message stores makes for faster and more seamless migrations to new hardware or operating system platforms. For customers looking to perform NetWare to Linux migrations, this is a great place to start when planning your GroupWise server migrations.
Donna Moyer is Principal/Senior Network Consultant of Uptime NetManagement, Inc. (http://www.uptimenmi.com/). Uptime is a Novell Gold Solutions partner providing technology solutions, customized training, and consulting services. If you are interested in finding out exactly what Novell can do for your business, or are seeking to maximize the benefits from your current Novell systems, call us today at 610-621-1244!
Why Businesses need a Solution for Outlook Email Archiving
Ranging from business compliance to the performance of Outlook itself there are many reasons why in today’s world a company needs to look for a successful Outlook email archiving solution. There are a number of issues that businesses face with regards to email archiving and compliance below this article focuses on the more critical issues and some of the solutions to these problems. Whilst this article is focusing predominantly on businesses that use the Outlook and Microsoft Exchange systems much of what is discussed will be relevant to all businesses, particularly in the US and the UK.
Research has shown that the average worker can spend up to 90 minutes of every workday managing their mailboxes and performing archiving and data management tasks. This leads to loss of productivity to the entire business. Aside from the productivity issues most Exchange servers are only set to backup information once per day, meaning that any emails that have been deleted through the course of a day are not archived this can also be said to the auto archiving feature that Outlook has. Also due to the way that the auto-archive feature works, finding a specific email that has been archived is incredibly laborious and time consuming.
There are several issues that need to be looked at with regard to the need for a good email archiving solution, these issues are outlined below.
Data flow over time
Before looking at any of the legal ramifications or performance problems of not having a good email archiving solutions it is important to first look at the points which create these issues.
Even smaller companies will generate massive amounts of emails over a long period of time. This is caused by storage of emails and attachments, however part of the problem stems from having all versions of these emails stored for example: an email is sent out with a 1 MB attachment to every employee (30 people). Every reply to that email is also now being stored along with the original email text. Whilst the email sizes are not of any real significance at this point, over a period of a year with multiple instances of this example the storage required will add up, especially with taking into account the attachment being saved also.
Auto Archiving
Many businesses feel that they have no problems with archiving as they have the Outlook auto archiving in place for their company emails. This unfortunately is not as helpful as it may at first seem to be. As mentioned earlier, any emails deleted prior to the auto-archive taking place are not archived. This in itself provides massive issues with compliance which will be covered later.
A common problem shared by all companies that rely on the Outlook auto archive tool is initially the build up of emails and more specifically the overall deterioration of performance from the Microsoft Exchange servers as a consequence of a large email volume. As the Exchange servers fill with archived emails the system begins to slow and takes longer to perform each backup. The servers filling also increase the chance of a critical systems failure.
Outlook saves all email data as .pst files when it archives the old emails. Many .pst files will be created over time as bulk archives are created over a period of time. How often this happens depends on the specific settings a company has organised themselves and how many emails the company has sent and received within specifically set parameters. These parameters would be determined by the company’s individual settings. The more data stored on a .pst file the slower the servers and Outlook will function for their various daily tasks such as a backup.
A more pressing concern with the way that Outlook auto archive functions however is that bulk email packages are saved as .pst files, specifically a maximum storage per file of 20 GB. 20 GB of space can store thousands of emails; if a .pst file is corrupted the information on every one of those emails can potentially be lost forever. Aside from the difficulty for an individual to navigate these files to locate specific emails when called upon to do so, if the files are lost this can provide very costly issues with regard to compliance.
Compliance
The issues of compliance covers multiple different points that will affect companies to different degrees depending on what countries they are in or do business with. That said all of these points are worth understanding as the laws are quickly changing world wide to cover the issues raised by emails being regarded as legal documents. Whilst the specifics below are predominantly for the UK, other countries will have similar laws with different specifics laid out.
Freedom of Information Act 2000 (UK)
The public have the right to ask for copies of emails from public authorities. The authorities then have 20 days in which to provide the copies.
Data Protection Act
Individuals have the right to request for copies of personal data held about them by an authority or company. The authority or company then has a 40 day time frame for compliance; failure to comply can lead to heavy fines.
Employment Tribunals
The highest possible award at a tribunal for unfair dismissal in the UK is £66,200. With more communication in the places of work happening via email, companies need to ensure that they have easy access to all possible evidence available to protect themselves
Court Actions
A wronged party has 6 years from the date that a contract has been breached or a civil wrong committed to bring a court action. With emails potentially being used by either party it is necessary for a company or organisation to be able to access any information required that was stored within those previous 6 years. This means it is paramount that an organisation has the best possible email archiving system available to them. The system the organisation uses can make the difference between winning and losing a court action. Furthermore inability to provide requested evidence can result in heavy fines depending on the nature of the court action, thus having the ability to store and easily find the information could avoid these fines before a court action ever reaches a court.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act
This is a piece of US legislation also affects any company outside of the US which is listed on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, including subsidiaries of US companies that are themselves based outside of the US. The Act states that any transactional data meet the requirement of the Act. Furthermore the Act sates over several sections that an organisation’s IT department is obligated to be able to provide any and all electronic data pertinent to a potential case during the discovery period in the event of a lawsuit or investigation. Simply put an organisation must be able to provide copies of any electronic data as requested during the discovery period, the period prior to a case where evidence is collected to prepare for the legal proceeding, to a legal action. Failure to provide the evidence in the discovery period results in heavy fines which are weighted against the nature of the legal proceeding.
The Solution
Most of the problems outlined above are not new and have been occurring for years, however with the exponential increase in the use of computers and by extension email these problems have begun to be far more severe and obvious. The only possible solution is for a company to utilise an email archiving solution. The qualities one should look for in an email archiving solution, as outlined by the problems listed above, are as follows:
Can function independently from the Outlook’s auto archive facility Allows for settings to be standardised with capacity for users to create and archive new email folders with ease A program that does not rely on storing emails in bulk but instead saves each email individually so as to avoid the issues of file corruption. However still provides the functionality to archive files at the same time A solution that allows for customised archiving structures allowing companies to tailor how and where the files are saved. A solution which allows for deletion upon archiving of the emails from Outlook to again avoid high email volume effecting Microsoft Exchange servers Intuitive design to negate the need for training or complications prior to use of the solution. A solution that saves emails in a format that is readable independently of Outlook
It is important that all these criteria be met at the very least when looking for a solution to email archiving with Outlook to avoid all of the problems listed above. In the end avoiding these problems could save your business time and money and avoid the issue of decreased productivity from staff spending too much time organising mailboxes.
MsgSave is an Outlook add-in designed to tackle all of the afore mentioned issues and many more. MsgSave is offered in 3 different versions to meet your specific needs. MsgSave is a product of Sarcophagus a leader in IT business solutions.
Email Archiving: are You Prepared for Unforeseen Legal Search Issues?
As every businessperson knows, controlling costs and increasing production is the basic business formula to achieve success. In reality, actually achieving that success is a much harder and intense proposition that requires you to provide a little wiggle room on both sides of the equation to deal with those pesky, unforeseen bumps in the road.
But what happens when a situation occurs that is so outside the sphere of normal business operations that you can neither deal efficiently nor effectively with it in order to get back to business as usual? In today’s technology driven business environment, this “situation” could be e-Discovery.
E-Discovery is defined as any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of being used as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. E-Discovery has the potential to become an extremely costly and time consuming undertaking especially when dealing with the retrieval of emails from archaic archiving systems commonly used today. To ease the burden, businesses are looking to companies such as Estorian who have developed software products that retrieve targeted communications sent via email and that work transparently with their own computer networks.
Still, the problem remains in that, despite the growing marketplace, businesses often do not know exactly what solutions they need to deal effectively with email archiving and retrieval. Or, if they are looking at various software packages, they do not know what key features that software should include. The following provides an overview to get you started:
• Software that is easy and quick to install, thus saving you time, money and resources during the initial set up.
• Simple user interface that is intuitive as well as easy for you to navigate.
• Multiple search options available such as keyword, sender/recipient (internal and external), date, time, attachments, subject, inbox/outbox, importance level, etc. so you can pull data from archives faster and more efficiently.
• Real time capabilities, i.e. the ability to set up recurring future searches (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) for investigations into specific subjects/email exchanges.
• Multiple location and file save capabilities such as .pdf, outlook folder, desktop folder, etc. for easy organization of email search reports.
• Flexibility to allow for future upgrades to search capabilities regarding legal and technological advances (IMs, chats, eFaxes, etc.).
Software packages such as Estorian’s LookingGlass incorporates all of these features and more, thereby providing businesses with an easy solution to company wide email archival and retrieval. As a result of using such products, businesses are reducing their legal and financial risk by continuously monitoring e-communications records across geographic locations and technical platforms from one single, easy to use interface.
Heather Bishara is a freelance writer and marketing executive for Tricalyx.
Today email system is the biggest tool in every business & this dependency of email system on business brings various problems. There are many issues which generally arise like: Storage, backups, problematic PST files, access to old emails and legal compliance. To solve and tackle these problems you need an Email Archiving Software & Email management solution.
Not only this, you need such a kind Email archiving solution which should be cost effective, easy to install and need very less administrative efforts.
So here is a solution of your problem. ITA Networks offers Email Archiving Software for Exchange Server 2000, 2003 & 2007. ITA Networks Email Archive easily manage the email processing system & its simple functions need very less administrative efforts to search and restore emails & archive mails.
• ITA Networks email archive works automatically & copy every single email that pass through Exchange server & stores all the mails in email server database.
• You could use stored emails from database anytime even when Exchange Server is offline due to problems or any reason.
• ITA Networks email archive moves essential & important data from mailboxes and stores the data Exchange Server database.
• ITA Networks email Archive extracts attachments form mails and save attachments separately & provides link for attachments in the links.
• ITA Networks email Archive provides security in case of critical e-mails getting lost due to PST files getting corrupted or e-mails getting lost for any reason. Backups take time to restore whereas Admin T own email Archive provides instant access to the e-mails, one more important reason for deploying ITA Networks email Archive on your network today.
• ITA Networks email Archive comes with built in SQL Database, so you do not have need to purchase additional software to store the emails.
• ITA Networks email Archive provides ability of search, view and restore emails to all users.
• ITA Networks email Archive connector system makes the process of archiving existing e-mails completely automated, easy, and effortless.
So with the help of ITA Networks email archive solution make your email system effortless and get good performance. To know more about of ITA Networks email Archive, visit this link: Email Archive Appliance
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Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One
Email management could be a company’s saving grace in today’s world of litigation and information overload. Email is now one of the most used communication systems around, over which important business decisions are often made, therefore an adequate email management system is vital to any business.
Managing one’s emails effectively could result in a much more productive work environment in terms of organization and timeliness, as well as helping with audit purposes. Furthermore, recent legislation has made it mandatory that all businesses and organizations need to be able to produce any documentation requested by the courts if legal issues arise.
Email Archiving as part of email management
Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. Administrators can maintain an archive of all the company’s email correspondence which will be easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduce the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and are not secure backups of email data.
Moreover, in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, email archiving is a must, whilst being able to access archived emails and corporate data in a matter of seconds can help realize a return on investment and therefore boost the company’s productivity.
Legislation and Regulations
Apart from the legal benefits that an email management policy presents, it is also important when dealing with inter-company issues such as harassment or dismissal charges, where critical information may have been recorded via email.
If an employee used his work email account for illicit purposes, verifying such a fact could prove to be a difficult task without an adequate email archiving system.
Email management from a legal perspective requires organizations to keep records of email documentation for a minimum period of up to five years. Such legislation includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which affects all industries and imposes severe penalties on anyone who deliberately alters or deletes documents with the intent to defraud third parties.
Even though it is a US law, SOX act is also applicable to European companies with US listings as well as to companies that do business with the US. There are other legislations that also require companies and organizations to archive emails, as well as government bodies that comply with the regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, National Archive Records Administration (NARA) and other legislative entities.
Storage & Knowledge Issues with Email Management
Managing one’s emails is not only a legal and compliance issue but also delves into the fields of storage and knowledge management. There has been a dramatic increase in storage size due to the increase in email usage over the years as well as the upsurge in attachments sent with original emails.
This increase has affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. An efficient email archiving solution stores emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings and centralizes your email records.
Furthermore, emails are automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do so without having bulky PST files stored locally.
Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for an email management policy a critical issue for any company. Managing emails through archiving allows organizations to have control over employees’ email accounts whilst ensuring regulatory and corporate compliance.
Jesmond Darmanin is a freelance writer who is passionate about business IT issues and recommends the use of email archiving software as part of a reliable email management policy.
