What are the three words that companies frequently overlook? It is email retention policy. According to studies, it has been found that the volume of electronic messages sent and received by businesses is nearing the mark of 210 billion a day. It has also been predicted that employees will spend at least 41 percent of their time managing electronically stored information. Just imagine! First thing in the morning, corporate employees switch on their PCs and get prepared to brave the influx of mails invading their mailboxes. They get busy deleting data that seem irrelevant, spam, or insignificant. Then, how are you sure that some sensitive client data is not deleted amidst countless spam messages? This implies wastage of time and effort without having the task done. This is the reason why companies are opting for email archival solutions.
An enterprise email archiving system is pertinent for companies and industries controlled by stringent compliance laws. Educational institutions, financial enterprises, health care firms, and government agencies are taking data storage seriously because of regulations such as SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, NASD, HIPPA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and FRCP. These regulations are making organizations implement foolproof storage and archival policies. With such policies in place, your company will be saved from hefty legal fines amounting to millions of dollars. It might also put firms out of business.
Before implementing any mail retention policy, there are certain considerations. These include:
- How long do you wish to store information?
- Decide the kind of records that you intend to retain and what to discard.
- How do you intend to get rid of unwanted and spam mails?
- Educate staff across all departments about the policy and the consequences, if one fails to comply.
Again, the archiving system should have certain features to match your data protection needs. They are:
- All types of info should be safely stored including simple text mails, attachments like word files, PDFs, and presentation slides. Make sure that both inbound and outbound mails are captured.
- It should match the regulations in the event of an eDiscovery request and litigation issues. The archival solution must have the ability to retrieve records in their original format.
- There should be an advanced search feature so that old records are quickly retrieved.
- The security of the archives should be ensured by way of encryption.
So, you see that allowing staff to archive messages manually is not only time consuming but will also cost an organization heavily. There might be slips while archiving which can be intentional or unintentional. Deliberate or unintended, such blunders can result in serious issues from the perspective of eDiscovery requests. However, with email archival solutions in place, your company will be spared legal fines and hassles.
To infer, it can be said that companies must never allow their staff to store mails in individual computers or archives. The reason is predictable. In the event of litigation, the team responsible for the case will pull records from employees' personal hard drives and mailboxes. This is offensive and time taking which you never want to happen.
Author's Bio:
Audrian Cambell has been a company head and he knows how email archival solutions work to help you maintain your emails storage and makes your job fast and easier. In this article, he shares his knowledge about how enterprise email archiving helps in the efficient management of data.
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