Anthony Ricigliano – Electronic Business Communications

As IT best practices are rapidly transitioning from good ideas to legal requirements, companies are finding that retaining and archiving business-related communications is a necessity as opposed to a nice-to-have. To be clear, archiving is not the same as backing up your email server. A backup is typically only used to restore the system after a failure or to revert back to a previous state. An archive is semi-permanent storage of mission-critical documents and other emails that are required to be kept for regulatory compliance or other reasons. Let’s take a closer look at this growing concern:

Industry Regulations

Certain industries are required by law to maintain records of certain transactions for very specific time periods or face strict penalties. To complicate this matter, an individual business may face a different set of regulations on the local, state, federal, and even international level. Although these laws don’t generally refer to emails specifically, this medium is now recognized as the standard mechanism for trading both information and documents. Instead of the banks of file cabinets that were seen in a past era, companies with strict Anthony Ricigliano Industry Regulatory requirements should now be maintaining a bank of servers dedicated to not only storing business-critical emails, but also providing a fast and easy search and retrieval method.

Businesses that don’t comply with the rules when it comes to maintaining copies of legal documents and financial transactions run the risk of penalties imposed by organizations like the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sarbanes-Oxley, and a host of other government agencies. Not only can these agencies impose strict monetary penalties, they can also halt company operations in many cases.

Other Legal Issues

While the vast majority of businesses do not fall under the shadow of government regulation, every enterprise runs the risk of legal action as a general cost of doing business. These days, even the most impeccably-managed company has virtually no chance of staying out of the courtroom forever. As mentioned previously, email has become the accepted standard for both corporate and personal communications. With this evolution, court-ordered discovery motions have began asking for copies of emails more and more frequently.

If an organization can prove that it has a strict policy of always permanently deleting email messages under certain circumstances, like after a certain time period, they may be able to convince the court that the email messages simply cannot be reproduced. However, if there is even one exception to this rule, the company can be subject to sanctions and even losing the case if they do not produce the requested evidence during the discovery period. Of course, an ethical company has nothing to lose by producing the requested emails, and the documents could earn a judgment in their favor. Without them, it could be a very different outcome.

Archival and Retrieval Issues

Although most companies realize that the Anthony Ricigliano Archival and Retrieval Issues of business-critical email communications is necessary, many haven’t taken the necessary steps to implement an effective system. Some companies rely on individual users to maintain their own system of saving important emails. Historically, they have established size limitations on user-level mailboxes to force individuals to file critical messages and delete unimportant communications in a timely manner or face problems processing their incoming and outgoing messages. As document size has grown dramatically, this method is not nearly as effective as it once was as users spend an inordinate amount of time managing their mailboxes.

A more effective method involves an automatic archival system that transparently moves emails to the archive server after a certain amount of time. Although the information is no longer physically stored in the user’s primary mailbox, they continue to be able to access the emails in a timely manner through the retrieval process. The user’s no longer waste time managing their mailbox, the enterprise has a reliable archival method in place, and all legal requirements are covered.

The one drawback to this method is that many companies are seeing a dramatic growth in storage requirements. To combat this problem, newer methods to separate mission-critical business documents from meeting notices, day-to-day communications, and personal messages are needed. Instead of programming these complicated policies into the archival routine, dedicated mailboxes could be established to hold legal documents and other important communications.

To protect businesses from legal and regulatory repercussions, effective methods to both archive and retrieve business-critical emails must be implemented. By neglecting this important task, companies run the risk of sanctions, monetary penalties, and lost law suits.