Don’t forget that your business is legally obligated to retain copies of both internal and external emails and present your records if requested. That’s a pretty tall order when you consider the huge volumes of email that modern offices produce. But whilst it’s a burden having to store the email archive, retrieving the data when required is an even bigger challenge.
The temptation for the harassed IT manager is to use a tape storage solution for the email archive but this solution is of limited use when it comes to trying to locate and retrieve an email record.
Here’s our advice on tackling this email archiving challenge:
For starters, make sure everyone in your organization is aware of the requirements and risk associated with email transparency. It’s good advice to assume whatever you write in an email could one day be published on the front of USA Today, so watch what you write!
Don’t be haphazard or inconsistent about your email archiving strategy. Plan your strategy for archiving emails, then set rules for retaining and deleting data. Remember you could be asked to account for this process in a legal conflict, so make sure it stands up to scrutiny.
Your email archiving solution should not be costly or burdensome to your organization and staff. If it is – find another solution!
Have an automated email archiving solution to archive your data rather than rely on human input. This makes it far more likely that your archiving rules will be implemented.
Make sure you can locate and retrieve your carefully stored emails! Choose an email archiving solution that lets you quickly and easily locate and retrieve data as and when required using e-discovery and quick restoration features.
Consider a solution that incorporates stubbing for quick and easy retrieval of email data with the associated meta data (date/time of send etc). Whilst the email content is important, it’s often just as important to have the associated data that puts the email message into context. This includes the people copied in and the time of send, as well as any attachments.
Although the legal requirement to retain email records may seem overwhelming, there are email archiving solutions that reduce the burden on your business. Don’t panic and don’t let it overwhelm you – talk to us, try a free trial and take back control of your email archiving today.
