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February 20, 2004 (Computerworld) -- While employees are complaining about the volume of e-mail they have to wade through, most IT managers are reaching for the antacid as they tackle e-mail management. Today, with the exponential growth of e-mail databases, regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley, and increased scrutiny from regulatory organizations such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, e-mail management policy -- or a lack thereof -- has weighty implications for the IT environments and businesses they serve.
One thing is certain: There are timeliness, content and format requirements that must be met to comply with these regulations. Without policies and tools in place, simply leaving it to employees to use their best judgment can make it extremely difficult to satisfy the law. As employees store correspondence on myriad local drives, they make files inaccessible. And without periodic backups, the risk of damage to these files grows.
When it comes to policy, there are several factors to consider: the priorities spurring the need for policy, accessibility issues, deciding what to archive, and storage capabilities.
The all-important "Why?" Consider what's driving the need for e-mail archiving. If an industry guideline or regulatory body is determining compliance, work with a vendor that is knowledgeable about those specific regulations, and involve your legal counsel to help determine archiving policies.
Regulatory guidelines may dictate format. For example, the SEC expects everything to be on CD and in duplicate. If you have a tiered solution, how easy, fast and costly will it be to move data to the acceptable format, and can you recover data rapidly enough to respond within audit time frames?
Even as we talk about guidelines, the lack of clear definitions for some regulatory requirements is becoming legendary. While businesses can spend too much time and money discussing ideal scenarios instead of trying to understand set guidelines, some of the guidelines are still very fluid. Industry groups and your legal counsel may be helpful in explaining how other businesses like yours are addressing the gray areas of e-mail compliance.
Whatever the purpose for pursuing an e-mail archive solution, knowing what must be kept vs. what might be useful to keep could save your business millions of dollars in the long term.
Accessibility. Your policy needs to address access, including who needs to review content and who can access e-mails once they are archived. The answers to this question will guide you in flagging and defining enforcement rules.
E-mail availability is another consideration. Does your archiving policy and architecture allow access to content originating from multiple clients and protocols -- for example, from mobile devices and the Web? These factors, along with regulatory requirements, impact archive architecture.
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