Efficient Email Archiving – Learning to Deal with Backups and Legacy Mail
By: Jim Reinert
Email has become the lifeblood of business. More than any other means of communication or business tool, companies rely on electronic messages – often stored on the Microsoft Exchange Server – for running virtually every aspect of their enterprises including simple internal communications, vital sales calls to customers, invoicing and high-level decision-making. A company could not survive without email just as it could not survive without telephones or electricity. Not only does it increase employee and business efficiency, but it is also the most cost-effective means of communication. In today’s business environment, email recovery has risen to a new level of significance crucial to a company’s existence.
In addition to the monetary value of email, there are a variety of regulatory demands for recovering email that dictate more robust storage practices. Several state and federal regulations require that email be kept as a normal part of doing business. The Food and Drug Administration and the Security and Exchange Commission have rules for what information must be stored and made accessible, for example. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has imposed a variety of regulations on how health-related information must be stored. Most recently, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2004 requires companies to certify that they have internal controls in place ensuring the accuracy and veracity of financial reporting. Included in this reporting requirement are internal controls related to records management and storage.
Since email dominates today’s business environment, often containing vital pieces of information that may assist a company in tracking key events, employee behavior and information exchanges, emails can also be valid legal documents. As such, they require secure storage, restoration and production in the event of an investigation or lawsuit. It is imperative that IT staff understand and comply with the regulations for producing emails as formal records versus simply restoring emails for internal business purposes.
These examples demonstrate that all of this "old email" can no longer be simply deleted and forgotten. Old messages are becoming increasingly important for corporations as many companies have faced requirements during the past few years to search through backup tapes to recover old emails in response to a request from the legal department, human resources department or another division within the enterprise. These companies are left with the option of recovering email from backup tapes which is possible in many cases, but extremely difficult for a number of reasons including; disruption to normal IT procedures; the need to create recovery server for restorations; time spent searching for needed content; and time required of IT personnel for the task.
All of these factors have resulted in email management taking on increased importance in the corporate environment. Companies are quickly realizing the value of incorporating more sophisticated email archiving systems that can make storage simpler through automatic indexing, storage and purging of records according to corporate policies, especially in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare or financial services. Utilizing new message archiving systems can also provide additional benefits, including the ability to automatically migrate messaging system content to other storage media.
Jim Reinert from Ontrack Data Recovery, providers of data recovery services and software. Ontrack Data Recovery. Contact 0800 243 996 for enquiries.
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