Email archiving
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Email archiving is the act of preserving and making searchable all email to/from an individual. Email archiving solutions capture email content either directly from the email application itself or during transport. The messages are typically then stored on magnetic disk storage and indexed to simplify future searches. In addition to simply accumulating email messages, these applications index and provide quick, searchable access to archived messages independent of the users of the system using a couple of different technical methods of implementation. The reasons a company may opt to implement an email archiving solution include protection of mission critical data, to meet retention and supervision requirements of applicable regulations, and for e-discovery purposes. It is predicted that the email archiving market will grow from nearly $2.1 billion in 2009 to over $5.1 billion in 2013.[1]
Definition
Email archiving is an automated process for preserving and protecting all inbound and outbound email messages (as well as attachments and metadata) so they can be accessed at a later date should the need arise. The benefits of email archiving include the recovery of lost or accidentally deleted emails, accelerated audit response, preservation of the intellectual property contained in business email and its attachments and "eDiscovery" in the case of litigation or internal investigations (what happened when, who said what).
Overview
Email Archiving is the process of capturing, preserving, and making easily searchable all email traffic to and from a given individual, organization, or service. Email archiving solutions capture email content either directly from the email server itself (journaling) or during message transit. The email archive can then be stored on magnetic tape, disk arrays, or now more often than not, in the cloud. Regardless of the location of the email archive, it gets indexed in order to speed future searches, and most archive vendors provide a search UI to simplify query construction.
In addition to email, attachments and associated
Objectives
There are many motivations for enterprises or end-users to invest in an Email Archiving solution, including:
- Data Preservation
- Protection of Intellectual Property
- Regulatory compliance
- Litigation and Legal Discovery
- Email Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Messaging System & Storage Optimization
- Monitoring of Internal & External Email Content
- Records Management (Email Retention Policies)
- Business & Email Continuity
Regulatory compliance
As enterprises of all sizes grow more reliant on email, the business value of that content is also growing. To protect this increasingly valuable information (intellectual property), numerous standards and regulations have been enacted to require records protection and retention as well as timely response to legal (discovery) and information (FOIA) requests.[2] Modern email archiving solutions allow companies to meet regulatory requirements or corporate policies by securing and preserving data and providing flexible data management policies to enable authorized users to enact 'legal holds', set retention and purge policies, or conduct searches across multiple mailboxes to complete various inquiries.
Some of the primary compliance requirements driving the need for secure email archiving are (alphabetically):
Canada
- Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) 29.7
- Mutual Fund Dealers Association (MFDA)[3][4]
- PIPEDA
Germany
Switzerland
- Schweizerisches Obligationenrecht, article 962
United Kingdom
- British Standards Institution- BS 4783, BS 7799/ISO 17799, BS ISO 15489-1, BSI DISC PD 0008, BSI DISC PD0010, BSI DISC PD0012
- Data Protection Act 1998
- Freedom of Information Act 2000
United States
- FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11
- Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)
- Freedom of Information Act
- Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
- [HFTA] (Hedge Fund Transparency Act)
- HIPAA
- Investment Advisors Act
- NYSERule 440
- Sarbanes-Oxley
- California Senate Bill 1386 (2002) (Only in California)
- Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4 and SEC Rule 17a-3
- Patriot Act
Note, that many of the compliance regulations require the preservation of "electronic business communications" which consist of not only email, but may include instant messaging, file attachments, Bloomberg Messaging, Reuters Messaging, PIN-to-PIN and SMS text messages, VoIP and other electronic messaging communications used in business.
Litigation and legal discovery
For
If an organization has multiple separate applications, for example for e-discovery, records information management, and email archiving, each application may have a separate database and it becomes difficult to de-duplicate messages and ensure that a single retention policy is being applied. From a legal point of view, this is important because once retention periods have expired the message should be purged from the archive.[8] Messages that are not purged are still discoverable, should litigation arise at a later date. As such, without a unified archive it is difficult to ensure one single retention policy. This problem is magnified for large organizations that manage tens of millions of emails per day.
Without email archiving, email likely exists on some combination of backup tapes and on
Email backup and disaster recovery
Email is the lifeblood of many modern businesses, and enterprises today depend more on reliable email service. Virtually all enterprises implement a messaging infrastructure to connect workers and enable business processes. In the e-commerce arena, employees may require access to email to close sales and manage accounts. These employees, plus many others, may choose to keep their emails indefinitely, but some organizations may mandate that emails more than 90 days old be deleted. Setting these kinds of retention policies deserves careful consideration as a single email could help a company win a lawsuit or avoid litigation altogether. Email archiving can also be used for business continuity at the individual employee level. When one employee quits, his/her replacement can be given access to the departed employee's archived messages in order to preserve correspondence records, and enable accelerated on-boarding.
As part of a comprehensive
Messaging system & storage optimization
Every email message takes up space on an email system's hard drive or some other permanent storage device (e.g.
See also
References
- ^ "The Radicati Group, Inc. Releases "E-Mail Archiving Market, 2009-2013" Study". Trading Markets. October 7, 2009. Archived from the original on May 22, 2010. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
- ^ "System Maintenance". IProduction.
- ^ "MFDA Rules". mfda.ca.
- ^ "Temp mail". Eztempmail.
- ^ Principles of data access and of digital documents (GDPdU) Archived 2011-07-18 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ The Sedona Canada Principles: Addressing Electronic Discovery, 2008
- ^ Kest, Kristopher; Drew Sorrell; Lowndes, Drosdick, Doster, Kantor & Reed, P.A. (April 12, 2013). "Are You Allowed to Intentionally Destroy Emails? Re: Privacy in the Workplace". The National Law Review. Retrieved 17 April 2013.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Maitland, Jo (October 17, 2008). "Best Practices: Email Archiving" (PDF). Forrester. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 10, 2022. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
Further reading
- Ratanatharathorn, Kristen C. (2017), "Correspondence Archives in the Age of Email: Technology, Privacy, and Policy Challenges", Philanthropy New York, US: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- "Carcanet Press Email Archive, University of Manchester", Digital Preservation Awards, UK: Digital Preservation Coalition, 2014
- The Future of Email Archives: a Report from the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives (PDF), Council on Library and Information Resources, 2018, archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-12-17, retrieved 2018-12-17
- How Long Should I Keep My Emails For?, 2017
External links
- Best Practices: Email Archiving by Forrester Research