Five Best Practices to Enable Records Management
(lowering user productivity).
3. Keep records "in place."
To minimize corporate risk and lower cost associated with storage and discovery, make sure that the content archiving solution you choose keeps these mission-critical records "in place." In-place records management refers to the concept of retaining email and files in the application in which they were originally captured—as opposed to creating a second copy of the records in your RM system.
The primary benefit to this approach is a lower risk burden to the enterprise. By retaining only a single copy of each message or document, an organization is more likely to adhere to its policies about disposition of these records. In some cases where an organization copies email/files to a second repository, it is caught off guard when the copy is deleted (as dictated by its policy) but the original still remains well beyond its expiration date.
On top of this, maintaining records in place delivers clear discovery benefits in case an organization is the subject of a lawsuit. For example, because the messages and files remain in the archive, these records cannot be edited and the chain-of-custody for data that must be discovered is never broken. Failure to protect against these actions can cause an organization to incur costly regulatory fines, to settle frivolous lawsuits out of court, or to lose litigation that erodes shareholder value.
4. Make your infrastructure as flexible as possible. Building an RM system from the ground up can be a risky proposition if your building blocks aren't flexible enough to evolve as requirements change during construction—or even after.
To protect your organization, be sure to choose a content archiving solution with inherent retention management capabilities that also has a liberal API offering. The latter will allow your organization to more quickly integrate with your chosen RM system once you've embarked on an enterprise-wide RM initiative involving more than email and files. Archiving applications with rigid rules about connecting with their infrastructure may not allow an organization to integrate its RM application with the email/file archive at all, or at the very least may require undue engineering efforts to achieve the level of integration required for the job that may cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The need for a flexible email/file archive doesn't stop once it's integrated with your RM system. RM is a relatively new and evolving concept, which may change over time and require your building blocks to change with it. You'll want to search for a solution that can:
- Provide retention management capabilities as part of its core offering;
- Facilitate the extension of your current RM capabilities;
- Connect to any kind of system—including those for new/emerging types of data; and
- Integrate with other RM systems (since your organization may be involved with M&A activity that may require further integration).
Having an email/file archive with a robust set of APIs, along with an established software developer's kit (SDK) that will allow for further extension, is an insurance policy that may save your organization over the lifespan of your RM system.
5. Ensure policies (and subsequent audits) are closely tied to each repository but not hard wired.
Organizations that choose to build an RM system using a content archiving solution as a building block must ensure that the policies that are set at the system level are carried through and enforced in the email/file archive. This can only be accomplished by tight integration.
But be careful that the integration isn't so tight that exceptions can't be made. For example, in cases where an organization's internal retention policies conflict with the requirements of a lawsuit (e.g., a company has a 90-day retention period but a case is expected to last a 12 months), retention policies in the archive must be set for "legal hold." This will ensure that the email/files required for the lawsuit are not deleted and may save the organization millions in lost suits or settlements.
In many cases, the "duty to preserve" data is triggered much earlier than when a lawsuit is initiated, however. For example, a company would be expected to place a legal hold on email/files related to its R&D efforts on the day a newspaper article is printed about its product defects—and not when an associated lawsuit commences. As a result, an archiving solution must be flexible enough to accommodate multiple legal holds, sometimes across thousands of cases at the same time.
Making a Choice in a Confusing Market
ZANTAZ EAS is a key building block for your RM system. EAS is an industry-leading email and file archiving solution that has retention management capabilities built right in, and can also be integrated with virtually any RM (or even ECM) system from partners.
Key to ZANTAZ's solution is the concept of "records in place." This is accomplished by developing pointers that are passed to the RM system for each document or message that is designated for reference/control by these applications. Because of this approach, ZANTAZ is able to connect with almost any RM application—as opposed to working with only a finite set of partners. In addition, ZANTAZ recently deployed a software developer's kit (SDK) with APIs to provide its customers with the greatest amount of flexibility on the market.
If you would like to learn more about how to integrate your organization's RM system to ZANTAZ EAS, contact a ZANTAZ account executive at 800-636-0095 or visit www.zantaz.com.
1. Enterprise Strategy Group
2. Corporate Counsel, estimates include $4.6B of internal costs and $1.2B in external costs for email discovery in 2005