Company email has become a vital source of evidence in legal proceedings over recent years. As it became more important to the way businesses operated and communicated, both internally and externally, the more useful email became in litigation.
Email compliance soon became an important part of an IT department’s life, and plans were hurriedly drawn up so organizations could meet their obligations. While archiving email has been a part of the IT schedule for many companies, it was often on an unofficial or ad-hoc basis. Then along came a raft of legislation compelling businesses to create and maintain an effective, and compliant archive and retrieval system.
Fortunately, even during its infancy, there were two methods of email compliance. The first was to control everything in-house, on the organizations own servers. Then build in a secure storage function, efficient retrieval and processes to answer E-discovery requests.
The second was to outsource the operation to third party providers and let them take the strain. They would take the email information off Exchange servers or other email platforms, format it, compress it and then store it securely. They would then service any E-discovery requests made by the client or their legal team.
Both have pros and cons.
Keeping it in-house involved a hefty investment in time and money. Extra hardware, networking, staff and processes would be needed in order to build a coherent, and compliant process that would satisfy the needs of the legislation. The benefit was that the organization retained full control of the data, the systems and the process.
Having the email compliance hosted offloaded just about all of the initial outlay, the need for the hardware, extra staff and the infrastructure to support a compliant system. That would be in the hands of the vendor. The size of the solution could also be scaled according to seats. If the client company grew, bought other entities or got purchased itself, the outsourced service could be scaled to meet the new needs.
The downside was that it is a recurring expense that the business has to pay, but doesn’t own. The organization also has to rely on the professionalism of the vendor in order to ensure the data is safe and that they are completely covered in the event of litigation or E-discovery requests.
There is no right answer to the question of what method is right for which business. That comes down to the individuals involved. Both solutions lend themselves to different scenarios, and different situations. The decision whether to go in-house or outsource depends entirely on where the organization is now, and where they plan to be in a few years time.
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