By Stacey McDaniel
No matter what industry you work in, the regulatory and legal climate has made protecting and preserving email a top priority. It's especially important in government, where email can include critical information relevant to national security and defense. It's also required for government agencies to be able to produce email, electronic files, and other documents for legal matters in response to internal and Congressional investigations. Still, according to surveys conducted by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, only 35% of companies have email retention policies, and 37% of employees say they don't know which messages should be retained and which should be discarded.
If you haven't yet figured out a solution for archiving email, it's time to start thinking about it. Failure to do so can end up costing your agency a great deal in terms of money, reputation, and citizen confidence. The good news is that an email archival solution has the potential to pay for itself, simply through avoiding compliance-related fines and optimizing the use of storage resources and employees' time. Many email archival solutions generate additional payback by optimizing the amount of storage required by the organization and by easing migrations to new systems or upgrades.
Email as evidence
Emails once thought to be private are now made public, often through legal discovery, and they can make for interesting reading and unpleasant headlines. Some recent high profile legal cases, such as the investigation about leaked information concerning former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, have utilized emails as evidence. What most people don't realize is just how tedious and expensive the road to actually discovering that email can be.
Without an email archiving solution, IT staff may have to travel to multiple locations to search for key emails, or spend time manually reading through volumes of email, restoring it from backup tapes, or imaging PCs to capture PST files in an attempt to find the key messages. According to a December 2005 Gartner Inc. report, "The Costs and Risks of E-Discovery in Litigation," organizations that have not "adopted formal e-discovery processes will spend nearly twice as much on gathering and producing documents as they will on legal services" through the year 2010.
Regulatory pressure
Over the past few years there has been a steady increase in the number of regulations and laws that call for better management, security, and storage of email. Federal regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's Rule 17A-4, and the upcoming amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which were scheduled to take effect on December 1, 2006), all require accountability and archiving of electronic information. The Federal Rules changes are especially important because parties in litigation are required to have an early meeting in which they agree to discovery production requirements, formats, and deadlines. Failure to know where you stand before you attend such a meeting can be legally fatal.
Finding the answer
Government agencies are generally bound to preserve many emails and other electronic messages, and the first step in this direction is to identify the right solution. Finding room for an exploding volume of email and attachments has caused numerous headaches for IT staff. Limiting mailbox size is not a very effective stopgap measure, and creating local archives on the network is unreliable and time consuming.
Now is also a good time to seek a scalable solution that will grow with your needs, and a comprehensive solution that could potentially archive all digital communications -- from instant messages to online faxes to file sharing.
Email archiving is something most end users generally don't know much about, and don't care much about, either. That is why a transparent archiving solution that requires no user interaction is ideal. With such a solution, email is archived behind the scenes, so users are free to email without worrying about mailbox storage quotas, and your agency will have peace of mind knowing that your emails are in a secure location.
Conclusion
Email (and the storage space required to house it) is growing at an alarming rate. At the same time, government IT departments are constantly being challenged to do more with less, leading to a need for an efficient yet effective way to archive emails and associated files. If you haven't already, your agency will be required to produce emails or other electronic files for legal or regulatory reasons. Manually searching through mountains of email can put a strain on your already tight resources, but technology solutions can help ease that burden.
Stacey McDaniel has been writing about high-tech issues for more than six years.