E-mail archiving provides compliance insurance

Storage Networking World - Choosing an e-mail protection strategy is like buying hurricane insurance for your house. The cost of full protection may seem high -- unless disaster strikes.
Chu Abad, vice president of IT at Seattle Northwest Securities Corp., has good reason to be grateful that he implemented message archiving: It protected the company when the government got serious about regulatory compliance five years ago.
The financial firm implemented iLumin Software Services Inc.'s Assentor Enterprise when the SEC Exchange Act Rule 17a-4(f) went into effect in 1999. The act requires that investment firms preserve records, including e-mail, for three years in a readily accessible format.
Assentor Enterprise automatically captures, indexes and stores all outgoing and incoming e-mail on disk. This makes it easy to retrieve samplings of e-mail records for SEC auditing purposes, Abad notes. And if a litigator requests, for example, all e-mails over the past six years that contain the words "profit" and "China," that's easily done with a keyword search.
Abad can thus feel confident that his company won't join the growing roster of major financial firms that have paid heavy financial penalties for failing to comply with information requests by litigators and government regulators.
"Just recently, Morgan Stanley spent millions just to retrieve e-mail because of a lawsuit," Abad says. "There have been a lot of events lately that are forcing financial companies our size to think seriously about implementing an electronic messaging archive system."

Increasing e-mail archiving interest
Indeed, 60% of respondents to a recent Osterman Research survey said that e-mail archiving was either "desirable" or "very desirable," although only 15% said they had actually deployed such a system, according to Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research.
"Most industries do not have the same level of data retention requirements as financial services or health care," he says. "The vast majority of businesses still use tape backup to preserve e-mail records over time, if they do it at all."
However, that's likely to change over the next few years. The Radicati Group, a market research firm in Palo Alto, Calif., predicts that revenues for enterprise-level active archiving and storing will grow to $1 billion by 2007. Demand will be driven not only by regulatory compliance but also by businesses' internal need to access crucial e-mail documents over time while managing rapidly proliferating message files more effectively.
The typical corporate e-mail account sends and receives about 7MB a day, which is expected to rise to 14.7MB per user, according to a Radicati Group report titled "The E-mail Archiving Industry Report