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Email archiving

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Email Archiving is the act of preserving and making searchable all email to/from an individual. Email archiving solutions capture email content either directly from the email application itself or during transport. The messages are typically then stored on magnetic disk storage and indexed to simplify future searches. In addition to simply accumulating email messages, these applications index and provide quick, searchable access to archived messages independent of the users of the system using a couple of different technical methods of implementation. The reasons a company may opt to implement an email archiving solution include protection of mission critical data, to meet retention and supervision requirements of applicable regulations, and for e-discovery purposes. It is predicted that the email archiving marketing will grow from nearly $2.1 billion in 2009 to over $5.1 billion in 2013.[1]

Definition

Email archiving is a systematic approach to saving and protecting the data contained in email messages so it can be accessed quickly at a later date.

Overview

Email Archiving is the process of capturing, preserving, and making easily searchable all email traffic to and from a given individual, organization, or service. Email archiving solutions capture email content either directly from the email application itself or during transport. For organizations that must meet regulations the latter is most often utilized, as the message is captured by the archive before the end-user can tamper or delete it. The messages are typically then stored on magnetic disk storage and indexed to simplify future searches.

In addition to email and attachments, some email archiving applications can also archive additional aspects of a mailbox including public folders, .pst files, calendars, contacts, notes, and associated metadata and context.

Objectives of Email Archiving

There are many motivations for enterprises or end-users to invest in an Email Archiving solution, including:

  • Regulatory compliance
  • Litigation and Legal Discovery
  • Email backup and disaster recovery
  • Messaging system & storage optimization
  • Monitoring of internal and external email content
  • Records management (Email retention policy)
  • Business continuity

Regulatory Compliance

As industry and government alike grow continually more reliant on information system, particularly email, this information becomes more valuable. To protect this valuable information, standards and government regulations have been enacted that require certain retention periods and timely response to legal and information queries.[2] A proper email archiving system allows companies to meet regulatory, and/or business records retention requirements by enabling compliance officers to easily search email stored in the archive and perform periodic reviews.

Several of the primary legal compliance requirements are defined by (alphabetical):

Canada

Germany

Switzerland

United Kingdom

United States

Note, that many of the compliance regulations require the preservation of "electronic business communications" which consist of not only email, but may include instant messaging, file attachments, Bloomberg Messaging, Reuters Messaging, PIN-to-PIN and SMS text messages, VoIP and other electronic messaging communications used in business.

For legal discovery, email archiving solutions will lower the overall risk of spoliation and greatly speed up electronic discovery. This is because messages are indexed, audit trails are provided, messages are deduplicated, and legal hold/preservation can be applied.[5] For litigation support, email can be retrieved quickly and a history of the email exists to prove its authenticity for chain of custody. For compliance support, email records are stored in the archive according to administrator defined retention policies. When retention periods expire, email is automatically deleted by the archiving application. In order to be compliant, an organization can intentionally destroy email messages, so long as (1) the destruction is done pursuant to a stated company policy and (2) the destruction stops immediately if an incident occurs which could give rise to a lawsuit. [6]

If an organization has multiple separate applications, for example for e-discovery, records information management, and email archiving, each application may have a separate database and it becomes difficult to de-duplicate messages and ensure that a single retention policy is being applied. From a legal point of view, this is important because once retention periods have expired the message should be purged from the archive.[7] Messages that are not purged are still discoverable, should litigation arise at a later date. As such, without a unified archive it is difficult to ensure one single retention policy. This problem is magnified for large organizations that manage tens of millions of emails per day.

Without email archiving, email likely exists on some combination of backup tapes and on end users’ local workstations. If a specific email needs to be found for an internal investigation or in response to litigation, it can take weeks to find and costs a great deal. With today’s legal discovery rules (see FRCP: http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/RulesAndPolicies/rules/EDiscovery_w_Notes.pdf) and compliance legislations, it has become necessary for IT departments to centrally manage and archive their organization’s email, so email can be searched and found in minutes; not days or weeks.

Email backup and disaster recovery

In order to survive, most enterprises today depend on high volumes of email running efficiently through their systems. Virtually all enterprises require that messaging be a part of the underlying IT infrastructure. Many decision-makers describe systems such as Microsoft’s Exchange as the single most important communication and business application within their operation.

In the e-commerce arena, employees must have access to email to close sales and to manage accounts. These types of employees, plus many other types, often want to keep their emails indefinitely, but some organizations mandate that emails more than 90 days old be deleted. Deleting older emails is foolish because the one email that might help a company win a law suit might be nonexistent. Also, any email that is successfully delivered has two copies, the sender and the recipient. Any email sent or received outside the company will probably still exist, even if the company has deleted it on their own side. Thus it is important for the company to keep a backup of the emails sent and received by its employees.

Email archiving can also be used for business continuity at the individual employee level. When one employee quits, his or her replacement can be given access to the departed employee's archived messages in order to preserve correspondence records.

Messaging system & storage optimization

Every email message takes up space on a email system's hard drive or some other permanent storage device (e.g. Network Attached Storage, Storage Area Network, etc.). As the size of these messages increase, simple operations such as retrieving, searching, indexing, backup, etc. take utilize more information system resources. At some point older data must be removed from the production email system so that they can maintain a level of performance for their primary use, exchange of email messages. Email archiving solutions improve email server performance and storage efficiency by removing email and attachments from the messaging server based on administrator defined policies. Archived email and attachments remain accessible to end users via the existing email client applications.

References

  1. ^ The Radicati Group, Inc. Releases "E-Mail Archiving Market, 2009-2013" Study
  2. ^ E-Mail Archiving Growth Fueled by Federal Rule Changes
  3. ^ MFDA Rules
  4. ^ Principles of data access and of digital documents (GDPdU)
  5. ^ The Sedona Canada Principles: Addressing Electronic Discovery, 2008
  6. ^ Kest, Kristopher; Drew Sorrell; Lowndes, Drosdick, Doster, Kantor & Reed, P.A. (April 12, 2013). "Are You Allowed to Intentionally Destroy Emails? Re: Privacy in the Workplace". The National Law Review. Retrieved 17 April 2013.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ^ http://www.usdatavault.com/library/email_archiving_best_practices.pdf

See also

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