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by TechShowNetwork

The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

Email has become the standard method of correspondence used by businesses sending important and sometimes confidential messages. Such sensitive information needs to be archived for possible future use in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, specific regulations as well as the company’s email compliance policies.

Email correspondence is used for both internal and external affairs therefore it is important that a copy of all emails is archived for possible future needs relating to legal, compliance and human resource issues. A company must also be in a position to respond to eDiscovery requests at short notice.

Why a company needs email archiving

Existing regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the FRCP treat emails as being equal to paper-based documents in terms of valid and legal documentation presented in a court of law and are therefore admissible during an eDiscovery request.

eDiscovery is the process of locating, securing and using documentation from a company’s archives in a legal setting, so a company must have the ability to procure the necessary documents with the confirmation that these have not been tampered with. Failure to abide by procedures could result in court fines and other financial burdens, as well as a failing reputation.

How email archiving should be implemented

For security, maintenance and resource reasons, email archives should not be archived on the mail server but should have their own localized server that is specific to the task.

Having your emails archived on a separate database ensures more protection for the archives should the server crash, as well as lightening the load on the server. When archiving is another process that the email server is meant to handle, its resources are being stretched to capacity risking poor performance in both tasks. A dedicated email server and a dedicated archiving server render the upkeep of both machines a simpler and cleaner process.

Moreover, separate backups of both servers ensure a safer environment, as by having the archived emails on a separate server, should the email server crash all is not lost since the archived emails would be accessible and easily recoverable meaning that work can be resumed from a certain point.

Email archiving compliance

In industries and countries where regulations require organizations to monitor user activity and keep audit trails, a system that records, logs and retains a database of user activity, or other secure methods such as encryption will ensure that emails have not been tampered with as this would render them inadmissible in a court of law. An auditing facility is also important for compliance purposes.

Log files and counts must prove that all emails (including their attachments) are being captured and can be searched for, found and viewed in their original format. Advising users that their emails are being recorded and archived will act as a deterrent to any abuse of the system.

Email archiving is becoming a standard practice in today’s businesses as the implementation of a successful email compliance policy could save a company a lot of time, money and resources, and provide guarantees that it is in a position to respond to eDiscovery processes and fulfil the requirements of compliance regulation which the company must adhere to.

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Tags: Benefits, Business, Compliance, Email
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by City College Norwich

Email Management Helps Tame Email Overload

You’re in good company if, like other firms with no email management strategy, your employees are complaining they’re being overwhelmed by email. The convenience of email is quickly being lost in the time spent reading, responding to and managing it.

There are three important reasons to get your company’s email overload under control. Let’s examine how compliance, employee efficiency and electronic discovery are compromised by an unruly email management system. 

Compromised Compliance

If your employees regularly receive email with legal documents attached having a structured electronic content management (ECM) system is crucial. This would ensure that your emails related to documenting commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and easily retrievable.

Ask yourself these questions: “Do my employees always document receipt of business-critical documents by email?” and “What kind of legal documentation is received that isn’t being stored in a way that allows access by others?”

If you’re unsure of the answers to those questions, your company’s compliance with contractual and regulatory requirements could be at risk. Contracts received but not documented, changes made to legal documents but not tracked or saved in a centralized document management system are just two of the problems that arise when email remains unmanaged.

Compromised Employee Efficiency

Recent studies show that workers at major companies are spending at least one hour, and many of them up to three hours, every day reading, responding to and trying to manually manage email. Overflowing in-boxes keep employees chained to their in-box and away from their primary job duties.

Capturing, sorting, storing and retrieving email messages and attachments manually and not having  an automated record retention and email destruction schedule are some of the ways efficiency is compromised .

To get a picture of what email handling is costing you in terms of employee efficiency, multiply your total number of employees who receive email by one hour. That’s the minimum number of man hours per day you’re probably losing to inefficient email management.

Compromised Electronic Discovery

Electronic legal discovery is often necessary when litigation is filed by or against your company. It’s the process of retrieving and examining electronic records for information relevant to legal action or compliance reviews.

Being able to retrieve electronic documents and messages quickly is vital to a strong legal defense or compliance strategy, and mandated by law. Surprisingly, many companies still do not have a formal system for archiving employee email in a way that makes that retrieval straightforward.

Even worse, many companies have no written policies about when employee email can be deleted. You may find yourself forced to explain that critical messages were deleted by employees because no email retention policy was in place.

Additional Security

Security is always enhanced when email automation is implemented. Automated encryption and other critical security measures are built into the data capture and storage process. Centralized email storage, as opposed to local machine storage, reduces the possibility of a security breach. Automating the retention and destruction schedules for email throughout your organization removes the human factor and insures uniform compliance with your firm’s email policies.

An Affordable Solution

One or more of these roadblocks to efficient operation may already be affecting your company if it has no formal email management system in place. You may, however, have delayed implementing electronic content management due to concerns about cost, digital storage space and IT staffing requirements.

Fortunately, today’s sophisticated email management systems are within reach of most organizations. Because this type of system can be part of a full-featured document management system, it requires no additional IT staffing or hardware outlay. It is also easy to use and economical to implement.

You can actually realize significant savings through increased employee efficiency brought about by automated management and fast retrieval of documents and emails.  Having the ability to access this information off-site via a secure web–based document management repository further improves efficiency and minimizes costs.

A well-designed ECM system enhances security, increases employee efficiency and allows timely compliance with regulations and electronic discovery requests. If your employees are buried by email overload, it’s time to introduce centralized email management as part of a document management strategy at your firm. The efficiencies you’ll realize will have you wondering why you waited so long.

Tags: Email, Helps, Management, Overload, Tame
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Why Businesses need a Solution for Outlook Email Archiving

Ranging from business compliance to the performance of Outlook itself there are many reasons why in today’s world a company needs to look for a successful Outlook email archiving solution. There are a number of issues that businesses face with regards to email archiving and compliance below this article focuses on the more critical issues and some of the solutions to these problems. Whilst this article is focusing predominantly on businesses that use the Outlook and Microsoft Exchange systems much of what is discussed will be relevant to all businesses, particularly in the US and the UK.

Research has shown that the average worker can spend up to 90 minutes of every workday managing their mailboxes and performing archiving and data management tasks. This leads to loss of productivity to the entire business. Aside from the productivity issues most Exchange servers are only set to backup information once per day, meaning that any emails that have been deleted through the course of a day are not archived this can also be said to the auto archiving feature that Outlook has.  Also due to the way that the auto-archive feature works, finding a specific email that has been archived is incredibly laborious and time consuming.

There are several issues that need to be looked at with regard to the need for a good email archiving solution, these issues are outlined below.

Data flow over time

Before looking at any of the legal ramifications or performance problems of not having a good email archiving solutions it is important to first look at the points which create these issues.

Even smaller companies will generate massive amounts of emails over a long period of time.  This is caused by storage of emails and attachments, however part of the problem stems from having all versions of these emails stored for example: an email is sent out with a 1 MB attachment to every employee (30 people). Every reply to that email is also now being stored along with the original email text. Whilst the email sizes are not of any real significance at this point, over a period of a year with multiple instances of this example the storage required will add up, especially with taking into account the attachment being saved also.

Auto Archiving

Many businesses feel that they have no problems with archiving as they have the Outlook auto archiving in place for their company emails. This unfortunately is not as helpful as it may at first seem to be.  As mentioned earlier, any emails deleted prior to the auto-archive taking place are not archived.  This in itself provides massive issues with compliance which will be covered later. 

A common problem shared by all companies that rely on the Outlook auto archive tool is initially the build up of emails and more specifically the overall deterioration of performance from the Microsoft Exchange servers as a consequence of a large email volume.  As the Exchange servers fill with archived emails the system begins to slow and takes longer to perform each backup. The servers filling also increase the chance of a critical systems failure.

Outlook saves all email data as .pst files when it archives the old emails. Many .pst files will be created over time as bulk archives are created over a period of time. How often this happens depends on the specific settings a company has organised themselves and how many emails the company has sent and received within specifically set parameters. These parameters would be determined by the company’s individual settings.  The more data stored on a .pst file the slower the servers and Outlook will function for their various daily tasks such as a backup.

A more pressing concern with the way that Outlook auto archive functions however is that bulk email packages are saved as .pst files, specifically a maximum storage per file of 20 GB. 20 GB of space can store thousands of emails; if a .pst file is corrupted the information on every one of those emails can potentially be lost forever.  Aside from the difficulty for an individual to navigate these files to locate specific emails when called upon to do so, if the files are lost this can provide very costly issues with regard to compliance.

Compliance

The issues of compliance covers multiple different points that will affect companies to different degrees depending on what countries they are in or do business with. That said all of these points are worth understanding as the laws are quickly changing world wide to cover the issues raised by emails being regarded as legal documents. Whilst the specifics below are predominantly for the UK, other countries will have similar laws with different specifics laid out.

Freedom of Information Act 2000 (UK)

The public have the right to ask for copies of emails from public authorities. The authorities then have 20 days in which to provide the copies.

Data Protection Act

Individuals have the right to request for copies of personal data held about them by an authority or company. The authority or company then has a 40 day time frame for compliance; failure to comply can lead to heavy fines.

Employment Tribunals

The highest possible award at a tribunal for unfair dismissal in the UK is £66,200. With more communication in the places of work happening via email, companies need to ensure that they have easy access to all possible evidence available to protect themselves

Court Actions

A wronged party has 6 years from the date that a contract has been breached or a civil wrong committed to bring a court action. With emails potentially being used by either party it is necessary for a company or organisation to be able to access any information required that was stored within those previous 6 years. This means it is paramount that an organisation has the best possible email archiving system available to them.  The system the organisation uses can make the difference between winning and losing a court action.  Furthermore inability to provide requested evidence can result in heavy fines depending on the nature of the court action, thus having the ability to store and easily find the information could avoid these fines before a court action ever reaches a court.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

This is a piece of US legislation also affects any company outside of the US which is listed on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, including subsidiaries of US companies that are themselves based outside of the US. The Act states that any transactional data meet the requirement of the Act.  Furthermore the Act sates over several sections that an organisation’s IT department is obligated to be able to provide any and all electronic data pertinent to a potential case during the discovery period in the event of a lawsuit or investigation.  Simply put an organisation must be able to provide copies of any electronic data as requested during the discovery period, the period prior to a case where evidence is collected to prepare for the legal proceeding, to a legal action.  Failure to provide the evidence in the discovery period results in heavy fines which are weighted against the nature of the legal proceeding.

The Solution

Most of the problems outlined above are not new and have been occurring for years, however with the exponential increase in the use of computers and by extension email these problems have begun to be far more severe and obvious.  The only possible solution is for a company to utilise an email archiving solution. The qualities one should look for in an email archiving solution, as outlined by the problems listed above, are as follows:

Can function independently from the Outlook’s auto archive facility Allows for settings to be standardised with capacity for users to create and archive new email folders with ease A program that does not rely on storing emails in bulk but instead saves each email individually so as to avoid the issues of file corruption. However still provides the functionality to archive files at the same time A solution that allows for customised archiving structures allowing companies to tailor how and where the files are saved. A solution which allows for deletion upon archiving of the emails from Outlook to again avoid high email volume effecting Microsoft Exchange servers Intuitive design to negate the need for training or complications prior to use of the solution. A solution that saves emails in a format that is readable independently of Outlook

It is important that all these criteria be met at the very least when looking for a solution to email archiving with Outlook to avoid all of the problems listed above. In the end avoiding these problems could save your business time and money and avoid the issue of decreased productivity from staff spending too much time organising mailboxes.

MsgSave is an Outlook add-in designed to tackle all of the afore mentioned issues and many more. MsgSave is offered in 3 different versions to meet your specific needs. MsgSave is a product of Sarcophagus a leader in IT business solutions.

Tags: Archiving, Businesses, Email, need, Outlook, Solution
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by Steve Rhodes

Email Archive Appliance

Today email system is the biggest tool in every business & this dependency of email system on business brings various problems. There are many issues which generally arise like: Storage, backups, problematic PST files, access to old emails and legal compliance. To solve and tackle these problems you need an Email Archiving Software & Email management solution.

Not only this, you need such a kind Email archiving solution which should be cost effective, easy to install and need very less administrative efforts.

So here is a solution of your problem. ITA Networks offers Email Archiving Software for Exchange Server 2000, 2003 & 2007. ITA Networks Email Archive easily manage the email processing system & its simple functions need very less administrative efforts to search and restore emails & archive mails.

• ITA Networks email archive works automatically & copy every single email that pass through Exchange server & stores all the mails in email server database.

• You could use stored emails from database anytime even when Exchange Server is offline due to problems or any reason.

• ITA Networks email archive moves essential & important data from mailboxes and stores the data Exchange Server database.

• ITA Networks email Archive extracts attachments form mails and save attachments separately & provides link for attachments in the links.

• ITA Networks email Archive provides security in case of critical e-mails getting lost due to PST files getting corrupted or e-mails getting lost for any reason. Backups take time to restore whereas Admin T own email Archive provides instant access to the e-mails, one more important reason for deploying ITA Networks email Archive on your network today.

• ITA Networks email Archive comes with built in SQL Database, so you do not have need to purchase additional software to store the emails.

• ITA Networks email Archive provides ability of search, view and restore emails to all users.

• ITA Networks email Archive connector system makes the process of archiving existing e-mails completely automated, easy, and effortless.

So with the help of ITA Networks email archive solution make your email system effortless and get good performance. To know more about of ITA Networks email Archive, visit this link:
Email Archive Appliance

For free Download visit here: Download Email Archive Appliance

If you need more information about ITA Networks email Archive software for Exchange Server 2000, 2003 & 2007 then you go through with these links:
Email Archive Appliance

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Tags: Appliance, Archive, Email
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