Email Archiving, A Necessary Burden for Your Business

Legalities aside, email archiving should be used by businesses large and small, no matter what their line of business. It was once thought to be the preserve of public companies until the changes in legislation made sure every company in the country had to comply.

Email archiving is also useful for internal purposes such as employee monitoring. While not very popular with staff, emails can be stored, retrieved and used for disciplinary or investigative purposes as well as compliance with internal guidelines. This kind of monitoring can not only warn the company about breaches in security, potential risks and insider dealing.

With an effective email archiving solution, alerts can be set up for keywords or key phrases in an email that can flag up potential risks as they happen. If this traffic is monitored regularly then action can be taken at the earliest signs, and potentially prevent it getting out of hand. The keywords can be anything pertinent to the business from resume, career, swear words, to client file, secrets, medication and anything company specific.

While this activity may not seem ethically sound, it is another tool in the ongoing mission to protect companies from damage from without, and within. Employees are often unaware of the problems they cause by sharing information they shouldn’t or gossiping about subjects that are better off left alone. If an effective email monitoring and archive system is in place then these kinds of incidents can be stopped in their tracks by early intervention or discipline.

Most smaller to medium companies don’t have a legal department so the burden falls to IT. In an in-house email archiving setup they will be the ones who control and maintain the system anyway so it’s logical for them to monitor. However, in an outsourced situation that burden can be passed to the vendor to take care of.

There is inevitably an expense to setting up an archiving solution, but in this country it is one that businesses cannot avoid. Since those high profile corporate fraud cases, it has been legally mandated that every company large or small who communicates via email has to have some kind of storage and archive facility for them.

If an E-discovery request is presented to a company without a coherent archive strategy, they may have trouble finding the data requested, or even worse, may not be able to find it at all. This not only causes problems for the litigation for which the data is bound, but also for the company itself. The government and judiciary don’t look kindly on those who don’t comply with these new laws as it hampers them when they are trying to investigate companies.

The whole idea of the new legislation was to improve public confidence in American business by ensuring there was always a paper trail for everything they did. Anything that gets in the way of that is viewed dimly indeed.

Related posts:

1. Methods of Email Compliance