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5 Best Practices for Email Archiving

Compliance & eDiscovery Sarah Vouga – Waterford Technologies Due to compliance with eDiscovery laws, including the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)

Compliance & eDiscovery

Sarah Vouga – Waterford Technologies

Due to compliance with eDiscovery laws, including the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), both businesses and government agencies alike are required to preserve copies of email- both internal and external- for future requests. Organizations are starting to find that when these eDisovery requests are made of their company, that it is both expensive and time consuming to achieve salvage of emails and data from backup tapes. Email Archiving is a modest and cost effective way for both public and private establishments to assure swift and thorough responses at any time.

The 5  Best Practices for Email Archiving are:

  1. Define Policies Early: Establishing retention and deletion policies at the beginning will keep storage from growing to an insurmountable level. A policy that states the motives for your standards and how end users should follow the policy is satisfactory in court provided you can prove your organization abides by it. Without a policy, you will be stuck with keeping everything. Forever.
  2. Enforce Your Policies: Once a policy is written, it must be enforced with an automated solution so as to eliminate the “human” factor of policy enforcement.
  3. Eliminate PSTs: PST files are created by end users to store their emails and keep them accessible. However, these files are not the best primary storage location for end users mailbox data. They expose the organization to legal risks and make it hard for you to locate emails when you need them- which usually happens with the burden to meet deadlines. With an email archiving solution, the archive becomes your central data repository where users can access their own emails easily.
  4. Backup Tapes Are Not Archives: Backup tapes should not be used as your central repository for emails. They capture information only from the point of backup- which will not include items that the end user deleted. They cannot capture the activity as it happens- backup tapes have no intelligence to index the email- it is just a copy.
  5. Stubbing: Provides immediate storage reduction of your email server, often times up to 80%- eliminating the need for mailbox quotas and improving the performance of your email server by lowering the capacity, with minimum end user impact for most companies.

 

For more tips on how to best utilize Email Archiving, call us today and schedule a demo!