Email Archiving - The Achilles Heel of Document and Records Management

Email has developed into a major communication channel within every company with thousands of them being exchanged every day. As most business critical information is sent over email, it is imperative for companies to archive all records, whether in paper or electronic form for compliance purposes. The need for compliance has been mandatory due to demands made by government and regulatory bodies like the SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, which were primarily driven by instances of email mismanagement. Over the last couple of years more than 90% of disputes have included email as part of the evidence.

According to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, public companies must keep all documents and communications for seven years following an audit. The penalties for destroying or altering a document can include fines of up to $5 million and imprisonment for up to 20 years. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that businesses that have the potential to be involved in lawsuits must prepare themselves to turn over email communications, if requested in a court case. Companies who don't have access to this information may lose lawsuits or incur extra expenses to recover necessary emails. Hence, email is becoming the Achilles heel of document and records management. The best way to protect yourself is through an effective email archiving solution that has become a major challenge for companies.

What is Email Archiving?

Email archiving is an organized way of capturing, saving and protecting every email that moves through your organizations server so that users can access it later, all the while conserving storage space. Email archiving makes it easy to store and manage large volumes of email at a single time and with search and retrieve tools to locate specific emails within minutes, saving companies precious time.

Email archiving not only ensures that the organization remains compliant with applicable laws and regulations; it is the best way to meet eDiscovery requirements. Although email archiving projects are frequently managed by the exchange server administrator, the choice of email archiving software must be carefully evaluated before implementing.

Benefits of Email Archiving

More and more businesses are now using archiving for storage management, to monitor employee communications and for disaster recovery.

Monitoring Employee Communication – This is usually used in legal proceedings where e-mail evidence is requested in association with an employee’s violation of corporate e-mail policies or misuse of business e-mail.

Storage Management – Archiving data helps eliminate past messages and helps free up space on the email server.

Disaster Recovery - Disaster can halt the normal operation of day-to-day business activities. Archiving helps recover the information to the same or to a new server at disk-transfer and LAN speeds. You can recover accidentally deleted or destroyed records that have been archived.

Working without an email archiving solution could be dangerous. Email archiving is perfect for companies who are looking for a solution to protect their mission critical data, reduce server load from emails and preserve data for legal and regulatory compliance requirements.

You may also take a look at -   email archiving solutions  and  email compliance 

Features to Consider While Deploying Archiving Solution

All these requirements lead to a long list of features that have to be supported by a real archiving solution tailored to the SMB. Requirements such as:

•  User ID management
•  User Transparency
•  Capture capability
•  Extraction capability
•  De‐duplication
•  Compression/encryption
•  Retention capabilities
•  Storage capabilities
•  Meta data capabilities
•  Search capabilities (search in search)
•  Litigation hold/Case management
•  Examination (compliance, questionable use)
•  Record destruction procedure
•  Platform support (HW, SW, OS, Mail, Client)
•  Index/Data Base Architecture
•  Data protection solution capabilities.

An SMB must carefully choose which email archiving solution to deploy. If the wrong solution is chosen, the SMB’s e‐mail troubles will double instead of disappear.

The ubiquity of e‐mail within an SMB continues to pose a number of challenges in the areas of storage, mail box size and secure information retrieval. Sonasoft offers a comprehensive portfolio of products for data recovery, exchange backup and recovery, e‐mail archiving and data protection.

Sonasoft ensures that data and applications are protected at all times so that the SMB business continues to run smoothly without any disruption. Sonasoft provides simplified storage and quick, easy access to critical data all at cost effective price points targeted for the SMB budget.

Sonasoft’s Email Archival solutions, SonaVault, is designed to meet regulatory compliance needs of organizations. SonaVault Email Archive systems will capture all incoming, outgoing and internal emails and store them in archive databases as a Single Instance Store (SIS). Also, by use of optional stubbing feature, message contents including attachments will be saved in the archive database and leave behind an empty shell of the message, namely stub in the body of the email. Alternatively messages can be completely deleted from users mailbox and users can access archived emails through SonaVault Web Console. This approach will reduce the size of the Exchange server by up to 90%. SonaVault  Email Archiving Software solution supports Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. SonaVault solution employs reliable safeguards, including encryption to ensure that the email is tamper-proof and cannot be altered. The solution gives the ability to migrate all existing PST file data into the archive repository. This enables organizations to eliminate PST files proliferation across the enterprise, thus resulting in better email management.

eDiscovery Solution for Email Archiving

Sonasoft provides a comprehensive email archiving solution coupled with features to enable and enhance ediscovery. Sonasoft’s archive solution provides simplified storage and quick, easy access to historical data. Data is stored efficiently on servers and can be accessed at any time. Sonasoft’s email archiving software product has the ability to archive, search and retrieve emails quickly and accurately.

With Sonasoft, enterprises have the ability to search historical emails based on a number of criteria including sender, recipient, date, key words or strings and attachments. With Sonasoft’s query builder tool, users can define a query in any desired way including the use of Boolean operators to narrow their search and to quickly get search results.

Sonasoft provides several security mechanisms to ensure the integrity of stored electronic data with tamper proof mechanisms. The archived information is compressed and encrypted and assigned digital signatures. There are rules defined for roles based access so that specific users have permissions to access the data that they are authorized for. In the event of multiple litigation cases, searched emails can be assigned to different legal case files in parallel. People can put notes in the case files with no limitations on the number of case files supported. The emails continue to be stored in case specific folders until the case is closed.

Multiple case tracking means that the people involved with the case and the emails associated with the case are easily identifiable.

Ediscovery can also be used to monitor emails to determine compliance to company policies. As a security measure and compliance with legal and statutory requirements, generally, an organization imposes certain restrictions on internal and external email communication to control the information shared. The Sonasoft email archiving solution provides options for efficient checking of archived emails for compliance with the rules specified by the company.

An alert is sent out when emails contain inappropriate keywords or text. These emails are then flagged and the Sonasoft solution provides a screen to review those emails to check for compliancy. Reviewers can enter comments, accept, change status or even escalate for further review. For example, in the case of internal communications, you can set a policy to flag all the emails sent by the human resources group which has sensitive data such as salary or other remuneration to people who are not supposed to receive the information. In case of external communications, you can set a policy to flag the emails sent by software designers or architects to personal email IDs on other email servers such as Google and Yahoo or others in competing companies. 

Sonasoft provides detailed audit reports that track a variety of metrics such as:

- Search requests

- Email statistics reports (inbound and outbound)

- Tampered message reports

- Reports for attachment types

- Data leakage

- Configuration management audit trails

- Reports for archived emails

These reports assist enterprises in tracking any activity surrounding access to stored data.