E-discovery has taken over from DNA as the most popular form of evidence in trials. The prevalence, and importance of email is our personal and professional lives is well known. That makes it fertile ground for litigation and the gathering of evidence. Email archiving makes the gathering of evidence in this way possible.

E-discovery is the method by which lawyers can request email information from companies to aid an investigation. Email archiving is mandated by law for just this reason. There are several things any business needs to know about e-discovery, and we’re going to discuss them here.

E-discovery applies to any electronically stored information (ESI). That includes social media, Instant Messaging, chat, and email. An email archive solution should include all ESI to fully comply. As new electronic communication methods evolve, the solution will have to include those too.

Alongside email data, instant messages and social media, ESI can also include databases, email attachments, email headers, and even metadata within an electronic document. A solid email archive should be able to store data in its original format, without destroying any of this data.

The main piece of legislation for civil cases is the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). It outlines obligations under the rules to assist in bringing cases to court. The rules are numerous, but there are three main rules that are useful to know.

They are:

• Rule 26 General Provisions Governing Discovery; Duty of Disclosure. This rule outlines the process for discovery including exemptions to the discovery process and a meeting between parties to discuss the organization of the process.
• Rule 34 – Production of Documents, Electronically Stored Information, and Things and Entry Upon Land for Inspection and Other Purposes. The main rule relating to e-discovery.
• Rule 37 – Failure to Make Disclosures or Cooperate in Discovery; Sanctions. This rule states the court cannot sanction the responding party for failing to provide ESI that was lost as a result of routine computer operations.

It would be useful for any business operating in the US to know each of these three rules. They form an important part of e-discovery, and will probably make their presence known at one point or another.

Another aspect of e-discovery is preserving the stored data from destruction while a case is being prepared. There is a mechanism called a Litigation Hold, which is designed to stop companies destroying incriminating data before it’s brought to court.

When a company is informed of an impending civil litigation, a Litigation Hold may be requested to enforce the preservation of all email archives to ensure the data is available for evidence. All data overwrites, destruction or other removal has to be stopped until the case is finished.

E-discovery and email archiving is a huge, contentious subject. It takes a trained lawyer to know the vagaries of such things, so it’s essential to seek professional legal advice if you receive an e-discovery request and you aren’t sure what to do.

It was clear from the product positioning that Microsoft is feeling the heat (GigaOm Pro, sub. req’d) from enterprise adoption of tools from Google, such as Gmail, many of which are free or available in low-cost versions for business use. Cisco — a long-time Microsoft partner — is also taking aim at Microsoft Exchange with a new enterprise email service, WebEx Email. Steve Elop, president of Microsoft’s business solutions division, made numerous mentions of cost savings that enterprises can purportedly reap with Exchange 2010, and there was much focus on the email archiving and legal compliance features to be found in both it and Outlook 2010. Among cost-saving citations, Elop noted that companies can now run Exchange Server on lower-cost storage platforms than SANs.

Indeed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been very vocal recently about that company’s “next billion-dollar opportunities” when it comes to delivering web-hosted applications and other tools that can serve as alternatives to Microsoft’s solutions — and its licensing fees. In fact, many of Schmidt’s recent comments are decidedly anti-Microsoft.

No doubt with Google’s focus on online-hosted applications in mind, many new features in Exchange and Outlook are designed to allow email inboxes and archives to migrate easily between on-premise deployments and online-hosted ones. For example, a demonstration at the Berlin event included taking an existing on-premise email inbox and transferring it to a web-hosted implementation. Exchange Server is available now for trial use, here (Microsoft Silverlight req’d.).

Microsoft officials also announced that the company is acquiring SourceGear’s Teamprise technology. Teamprise allows Java and Eclipse developers to create applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. We’ll be on the lookout for more announcements slated to arrive at TechEd this week and will update you as they come in. Stay tuned.

The main way that Google and other free email hosting sites are paid is by having advertising on businesses web pages. This is what keeps email free with these sites.
So the question is – is it worth paying for an email hosting service? Absolutely it is. Email hosting services offer businesses much more than the previous mentioned company. They offer spam blockers, php services, amongst other amazing features that are just too many to list. Good luck trying to get any customer service support from free email hosting services. Many businesses think that having ads on sites is a nuisance and unnecessary. When one pays for email hosting, more storage space is widely available just with a few dollars per month. As mentioned above, security is also better. There are things called spam bots that look for a number of things to destroy your website. One of theses things is email. I have an website with email hosting and I was ignoring my spam blocker because I didn’t think I would get as much spam as I did. When I ignored the spam, I received more than eighty ignorant spam emails per day. It became a hassle just deleting them, so finally I searched my email hosting and web hosting company trying to figure out a better way to block the spam.

Eventually, I found an anti-spam blocker in my control panel, downloaded it, and now I have been one hundred percent free of spam. I am able to control it. This almost backfired on me because there is a place that you set how many emails are allowed. I set it to one per email, then a friend emailed me twice, which went to my spam folder. Needless to say, this was easily resolved.

In truth, if you own a business and you don’t have a paid email hosting service, you will soon regret it. I could understand not paying for email hosting if it cost in excess of $40 per month. Almost all email hosting can be purchased for under ten dollars per month, so it is inexcusable if your a business and you don’t have email hosting. There are websites in abundance that offer email hosting, but you can get it right here, right now at our site. Make it worth your while as you see your business becoming more profitable with email hosting.

For those who still don’t know the difference, a backup is when a copy is taken of a given media and stored elsewhere.  This is to provide disaster recovery should any disaster befall the building, the company or its infrastructure.  Every business should have a comprehensive backup process that is followed to the letter, but it is different to archiving.

An archive is designed to copy, store and manage data for the longer term.  It is designed to be a permanently separate, accessible silo where the data can be safely kept.  Ideally it would be sited somewhere other than the premises, in a purpose built facility where it is protected from all forms of harm such as flood and fire.

In the case of an email archive, for compliance, the email data is siphoned off the corporate email platform and formatted into a particular state.  It is then indexed, compressed and then stored safely somewhere else.  That storage should be secure, safe and resilient, so the client can access their data should the need arise.

A backup can run in conjunction with an archive, but are completely separate entities.  They should not be confused.  The only driver for a backup procedure is disaster recovery and damage limitation.  Archiving is necessary to satisfy a range of legal obligations that are enforced aggressively, as well as the retention of important information.

It isn’t only for E-discovery that archiving is a good idea.  Business depends a lot of email using it as the main means of communication both internal and external.  Often corporate communications, policy changes and even external contracts are communicated this way, and they are important for any business to retain for a period of time.

On paper it is an easy mistake to make.  Both processes make copies of stuff for retrieval later but only one will protect an organization from litigation if an E-discovery request comes their way.

While emails can be retrieved from a backup, it is a time-consuming and laborious task.  With no real indexing facility, finding emails may take a significant amount of time, especially in larger, communication heavy organizations.

An email archive makes it easier to follow email trails and the branches that can occur when mail is copied and forwarded to multiple recipients.  A thorough implementation should also comply with the relevant legislation and prevent any action being taken against the company for non-compliance.

Let’s set the record straight once and for all.  A backup policy is good methodology, but entirely optional.  Email archiving is not.  It is mandatory and specified in more than a few laws.  Ever since those very high profile corporate scandal cases, every business has had to comply with a set of stringent compliance laws that demands an effective trail be left with any documentation of any kind.

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.