The Clichés of Email Management
Who isn’t concerned? The vast amount of email data within an organization is out of control. Perhaps it isn’t appropriate to make light of all the pressing email challenges by applying clichés, but the reality is that email problems can readily be addressed, and can be viewed as an opportunity for any organization to improve efficiencies and gain a competitive edge
1. “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Companies continue to struggle with what email should be retained and for how long. Let’s face it, our mail servers were never designed to be a content management repository. So how do companies achieve compliance with corporate policy and/or regulatory requirements while managing the vast amount of email produced daily?
The huge number of email messages and attachments stored in mailboxes, .pst, .nsf files, flat files, back-up tapes and the like, routinely put organizations at risk, and from the IT perspective put a major strain on their production mail systems. Without some form of email management, it is next to impossible to achieve compliance or proactively manage storage costs.
To really get control, you need to be able to capture messages, attachments, calendar items and the like, and apply the right policies to them. And, you need the flexibility to capture in a variety of ways, such as capturing and processing .pst or .nsf files floating around the infrastructure. Perhaps you want your employees to determine what it is they need to keep and have them deposit their pertinent data into the proper category. Real-time capture is very important for many organizations, so enabling journaling is key. To save time and costs, only one authentic copy of any message or attachment is needed, regardless of the distribution.
Setting retention is equally important. Not all emails need to live for the same amount of time, and many times there will be a need to place only a subset of messages on indefinite hold while others continue to drop off at their designated time of disposition. The indexing of messages and attachments is critical so that convenient search and retrieval can be performed from a central location upon request.
Getting control of your email typically requires some form of email management system, historically referred to as an email archiving system. Today, a truly effective email management system is part of a broader information governance initiative1. And with the right information governance strategy and technologies, a company can safeguard itself against saving too much, or conversely, “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
2. “Looking for a needle in a haystack.” “Finding the smoking gun.” Inevitably, all organizations will be faced with searching for a “needle in a haystack.” Perhaps it is part of a litigation request, or even more frequently, an internal audit. Time and time again, the “smoking gun” in a litigation or audit is found in an email. Hundreds of hours and millions of dollars in litigation and/or compliance fees could be saved with proactive email management.
And since electronic discovery (e-discovery) isn’t exclusive to email, a solution that touches all corporate content, across a variety of locations, is critical. As part of an organization’s overall strategy to achieve information governance, the technology should allow you to start with the biggest pain point (typically email) and build on that foundation to manage other data sources.
The best way to weed through the haystack is to gain early visibility into content to determine the best course of action. And the best way to do this is to bring the e-discovery process in-house and create a repeatable process to reduce time, cost and risk of e-discovery. Managing your data, email or otherwise, boils down to applying the right policies and automating the e-discovery process—ensuring proper collection, analysis, secure legal hold and disposition of the content at the end. And this ultimately reduces the time it takes to find the needle or the smoking gun.
3. “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Where your email comes from and goes to is often just as important as the content within the email. Chain of custody begins when an email, for instance, is collected, and that “chain” has to be maintained through disposition, in order to render the data accountable. When collecting email for evidence, you can imagine the difficulty in proving chain of custody when the data is collected from multiple locations: tapes, desktops, servers, etc., all the while never being certain that this information is authentic or complete. Ensuring that you have the right policies and systems in place means that you don’t have to worry about the “weakest link” when an e-discovery request is made.
4. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” “Have your cake and eat it, too.” Essentially all organizations need to find a better way to manage all of their content to reduce operational costs, manage corporate risk and prepare for e-discovery (audits, investigations, and litigation). If email is your biggest pain, it will only be more painful in the future. But in an economy where only the essential can be done, how can you be both proactive and results-oriented? Use a solution that allows you to quickly and cost-effectively address your pain points today, while building a practical, actionable information governance strategy for the future. If you can have your cake and eat it too, why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?
For more information on practical, actionable information governance solutions from EMC, visit
www.emc.com/sourceonecity.
1. Information governance includes strategies and technologies that enable an organization to gain intelligence about its information and apply the appropriate retention, disposition and long-term preservation policies. It enables an organization to take appropriate action on information based on its business value.