What is the cause of conflict between IT and Legal when it comes to data retention policies?
Data must be kept on company servers by law. As a result it is in both departments interest to ensure that information is correctly retained and easy to find in the event of a lawsuit.
The top reasons for keeping data:
- Legal – eDiscovery is part and parcel of most lawsuits now and emails are considered discoverable information.
- Compliance – existing and forthcoming regulation requires information to be kept for longer.
- Audit – when the auditors arrive, you need to quickly show them information.
- Time – often IT and Legal staff have no time to see what data resides on the company server.
Why this Causes a Problem
Lawyers need the data to be kept for a certain amount of time whilst IT are constantly trying to keep space free and reduce the amount of backed up data.
- Data Volume. The push and pull from both sides will only get worse as the volume of data continues to grow.
- Legal holds may require that copies of current mailboxes and messages on backups need to be recovered and placed in a separate, protected location.
- While the policy debate goes on, the mass of messages in the email server continue to grow and cause long backup times, potential for longer recovery times, and reduce reliability.
- Office 365 and Cloud – End users have the power to delete emails with what could be critical information for the company.
The solution
- Adopt clear internal retention policies dictated by Legal.
- Enforce retention policies by using an easy to use and powerful Retention Management solution.
- IT will then make deletions when requested. Legal will tell them the best time to do so.
- Policies need to be communicated between departments as clearly as possible so the company becomes compliant.
- Educate end users to not destroy email records and tracking responses to the notices (litigation hold).
MailMeter Retention Manager Benefits
- Have your key business divisions “singing from the same hymn sheet”
- Enforce email retention policies
- Protect against accidental deletion
- Prevent wilful destruction of email
- Remove the Office 365 and Cloud problem of end user deletion
- Meet regulatory requirements
- Pass Audits with confidence