One thing is certain: We're all under pressure to keep more data for longer periods of time, with greater consequences surrounding its entire life cycle. At each stage -- from creation onward to retention and destruction -- doing the correct thing with your corporate data is more important than ever.
As a result of the corporate accounting scandals of the last few years, new laws and the increased enforcement of old laws now require enterprises to reevaluate their records-management policies. E-mail records management has become a particular area of focus. Printing documents was the electronic records management solution for some enterprises, but with the growth in the volume of e-mail and instant messaging, enterprises need a new approach. Concurrently, the expanding size of e-mail system data stores presents operational challenges to IT organisations as they try to keep these systems running efficiently.
A new set of solutions has emerged to help solve these complex e-mail records management and e-mail system management issues. In their research, many industry analysts refer to this market area as "e-mail active archiving."
A good e-mail active archiving product provides a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time. It can often be used independently or as part of a corporate business record repository for legal and business management uses. It should also allow organisations to reduce the size of production e-mail data stores to gain significant operational efficiencies and related cost savings.
Clearly, as more vendors concern themselves with protecting, archiving, and recovering distributed data for their customers, we'll all be prompted to think about how we're addressing e-mail records management. But it's becoming clear that vendors aren't the only ones banging this drum. Published research, from analyst firms such as Gartner and others, also supports this view. Given regulatory requirements and escalating requests for electronic discovery, waiting until the enterprise plan for electronic records retention is defined, or for e-mail active archiving technology to get even more mature, could place your entire enterprise at risk.
IT departments already had enough on their hands trying to cope with the relentless increase in data storage and backup requirements. Now the need for secure, long-term electronic communications archiving procedures is greater than ever, significantly adding to IT's burden. To help in easing this burden, here are some areas to consider when selecting an e-mail archiving solution for your organisation.
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