Facilitate Email Records Management via Backup and Archiving
Traditionally companies save emails to backup tapes at regular intervals, such as the end of every business day, week or month. This means thousands of emails and attachments are kept on volumes of un-indexed tapes, usually stored off-site. These backup tapes are excellent for disaster recovery where an entire mailbox, system or even data center needs to be quickly re-created. But backup systems are not designed for information discovery, where responding to a request means finding specific emails and attachments based upon the context (e.g., date, sender, recipient) and content (e.g., keywords, subject line, attachments) of the information requested.
Another source of unstructured email is employee laptops. These local email caches, known as .PST files in the Microsoft Outlook/Exchange world, pose a tremendous challenge during the legal discovery process. These files are highly susceptible to corruption and/or accidental loss (e.g., if the laptop is stolen) or destruction (e.g., if the laptop crashes). Retrieving these .PST files means laboriously copying all business records off each laptop and then searching through them to find specific documents. Often this information is on the laptops of highly paid business executives, causing inconvenience and lost productivity of key company employees as laptops are taken away and imaged.
Once the data is restored, it must then be extracted for presentation in court. Depending on the size and scope of the discovery request, this entire process can take days, weeks or even months, especially as attachments in formats that cannot be searched electronically, such as PDF, have to be converted to text-searchable files. The cost of this process usually falls on the company being forced to produce its own records.
Fortunately, preparing for the e-discovery request goes hand-in-hand with meeting requirements for secure email retention and supervision that an ever-increasing number of organizations must meet. Many companies must retain records mandated by industry regulations. SEC Rule 17(a)-4 requires retention of all communication involving broker-dealer employees. Companies can also be forced to retain communications that have been placed on a litigation hold related to open or pending litigation.
An email archiving system relieves employees of the responsibility of deciding what email messages and attachments to retain and for how long. Deleted emails are rarely backed up and won't appear on imaged laptops. Litigation-hold requests are frequently enforced by asking employees to preserve specific emails. Employees are often expected to read and comply with long-documented retention policies, which flies in the face of the reality of the typical worker's daily work behaviors.
Not being able to produce requested email records—or worse, having the plaintiff or opponent produce them—opens the door to significant penalties. Even non-regulated businesses should retain records in a consistent manner. Case law has shown that companies that have haphazard or inconsistent approaches to records management place themselves at serious risk.
To ensure compliance with laws and regulations governing email retention, avoid the high costs of electronic data recovery and restoration, and eliminate the risk of heavy fines for not producing all requested information, a company must develop a proactive email retention and discovery policy. There are three steps that all organizations, regardless of their business or industry, should accomplish:
1. Determine which emails should be retained and for how long. This could be based on a specific segment of employees, such as C-level executives, or based on the nature of the email (for example, which emails are truly business records, or which are on a stated litigation hold). This varies depending on the relevant industry regulations and laws, and each organization should consult its legal counsel when developing its records retention and deletion policies.
2. Implement an email archiving system that immediately archives and indexes all messages passing through the email system (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino/Notes), stores them in their original form (emails and attachments) to a centralized repository with specified retention periods, and ensures the emails are not altered or deleted inappropriately.
3. Implement a software-based system that allows authorized reviewers to quickly pinpoint specific emails required as part of litigation support. This reduces the time spent searching for and recovering requested email records from weeks to just a few days. This significantly cuts the costs of meeting the e-Discovery request and ensures all requested records can be produced. The support of global marking schemes eliminates unnecessary duplication of a review effort when discovery requests overlap, as they frequently do.
An email archiving software tool provides a flexible archiving framework to enable the rapid discovery of content held within email, file system and collaborative environments, while helping to reduce storage costs and simplifying management. Typically, archiving software enables better management of unstructured content such as email via automated, policy-controlled archiving to online stores for active retention and seamless retrieval of information. The built-in powerful search and discovery capabilities of Enterprise Vault are complemented by specialized client applications for corporate governance, risk management and legal protection. Implementing Enterprise Vault helps reduce business and IT risks and addresses data management challenges surrounding storage management, compliance retention and discovery, and email upgrade, migration and consolidation.
Archiving plus Data Protection: Optimizing Data Management
The combination of new backup and recovery technologies with archiving enhances traditional backup and recovery or archiving alone by reducing the size of data stores of applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, or other file servers. Small data stores shrink backup and recovery times, and can help save money on storage and storage management. More importantly, this archived data can be leveraged for greater value through search and retrieval tools. End users benefit from the ability to initiate their own restores quickly and IT groups spend less time on administrative requests. Freed from end-user administrative tasks, IT can focus on strategic projects and better meet business requirements.
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