Hundreds of millions send and/or receive emails everyday. It has become as common place as breathing it seems. We monitor our inboxes or have alerts sent to our mobile devices informing us that we have new mail. The servant seems to have become the master. Now, in many occupations managing email archives has become a major concern and it is subject to regulator compliance at its most extreme.
To be in compliance, some organizations are required to take significant steps to manage their communications via email. At the most extreme level some organizations are required to capture every email sent or received (along with any attachments) and to preserve them in an evidentiary quality form in a highly controlled email archive. By every email sent or received, this requirement includes internal communications as well as external communications.
These regulations require a much more sophisticated email control system than one is going to get through any free hosting service; that is a certainty! With organizations specializing in handling these very complex regulatory requirements, these firms are staged to leverage best-in-class technologies for search, control, and on-demand importing and exporting functionality in real-time. Developing and maintaining such a system requires adherence to the following five key elements:
- Capture
- Preserve
- Search
- Supervise
- Produce
Managing all of the above is critical for achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance in email archiving.
Beginning with data capture, the regulatory system must be capable of making sure that no emails entering the organization are done so through means outside of the system. This is no small trick with the advent of mobile apps, WiFi, flash drives, and a whole array of ease of use items that people use to transfer and transmit data and files. Key to the systems will be its ability to capture any email, even though it may be encrypted, and prevent any possible data-leak.
Preserving the data requires data management in real time. The vast number of emails received and simply deleted in a single day can make this quite the challenge so the systems should be “live” to capture these instances despite the fact that the email is subsequently deleted anyway. The same should be said for new emails that are created and sent out on a daily basis. These communications need to be captured as well particularly if they are only sent to addresses outside of the organization.
One can just imagine the immense amounts of data that need to be stored over time. The ability to be able to search through all of this data to find specific documents is much like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, so high end search functionality is of critical importance as well.
Permissioned administrators need to be setup to review and control all incoming and outgoing communications in the email archiving system. These administrators will be charged with classification, encryption policies, data-leak prevention, and analyzing the overall effectiveness of the established policies by conducting comprehensive and customized reporting.
Last, but certainly not least, this level of email archiving requires the flexibility to continuously produce results and not hinder the speed in which daily communications are performed. All of the requirements must occur very quickly as communications cannot sit in some holding area waiting for someone to categorize or review.
Related posts:
- The Two Email Archive Models You Should Know Of If you are still to implement an email archive system...
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