Further legal aspects of archiving Further legal aspects of e-mail archiving The archiving of business critical data is always a challenge for IT managers - whether e-mails or files. By an explosion of messaging data and the ever more stringent legal requirements of electronic correspondence, however, additional requirements for e-mail archiving solutions. But on what criteria need to make IT managers and decision makers of a company when purchasing an archiving software, so that a compliant storage of emails is guaranteed?
without e-mail today is nothing more - it is one of the most important and best-controlled enterprise applications. But the digital Post corporate communications has not only simplified, from a legal perspective it is not without problems and can fill up the memory structures. The memory requirement in the messaging area is growing each year by an average of 24 percent - and rising. IT administrators are faced with the challenge, despite ever-growing e-mail volume, the operating costs for servers and minimize the mailbox storage space of the staff still keep to a minimum. The biggest challenge is however, is the e-mails with the legal requirements according to archive.
Electronic documents have become in recent years an enormous role in the proof for civil and criminal court proceedings. In the context of electronic discovery have all electronic data such as e-mails, instant messages or electronic calendar entries within a fixed, unchangeable deadline will be found completely. If this is not possible to face high fines and jail sentences. The awareness is already present in most companies, but often still significant gaps in the archiving system.
Professional e-mail archives provide a legally compliant and cost effective backup of data that can be adapted to individual business processes and used as a basis for company-internal knowledge management.
that the e-mail archiving software with existing infrastructure - the mail server is, operating system, databases or storage solutions - should be compatible enough to implement them quickly, to handle in conventional mail programs, integrated and easy - is self-explanatory, but what are also the most important criteria that an e-mail archiving software must bring in order for data to be stored in a revision secure?
data migration and reduction Most e-mails from users within a few days no longer needed and fill in the e-mail server is usually configured with powerful, expensive disk systems, just use up memory. The selected e-mail archiving solution should therefore provide a simple and proactive migration of e-mail files with appropriate automation and rules to an archiving platform that is cheaper and easier to maintain. While IT managers benefit because of a drastic reduction of the server operating costs, the users are excited about virtually unlimited storage space.
It should be ensured that the migration to the next storage level at any time the individual requirements of the IT infrastructure of an enterprise can be adjusted. In no way should include the transfer of large amounts of data to evaluate the performance of network storage and not to risk overloading and to no data loss. Contribute to resource conservation and features like data de-duplication, single instance storage and compression that save space in the archive. Single-instance storage means that each file is stored only once in the archive, while the de-duplication, an algorithm for repetitive elements in the stream studied. A compression of the e-mails is a change in the data according to statutory requirements and should therefore made only after de-duplication in securing the data.
indexing It is far from being sufficient, however, older e-mails just as easily move to save storage space to archive, to meet the statutory requirements. A useful e-mail archiving solution must also offer the possibility of already stored e-mails as quickly and easily recover if this is necessary. A simple search with search criteria such as date, sender / receiver and not often enough text. An e-mail consists of numerous components, such as subject, recipient, body text, names of file attachments or appendices of data and metadata, so it makes little sense to treat the email as a complete package. In some circumstances, an employee recalled only to find one of these components. If an indexing of the content based on the entire mail run, the search is irrelevant.
An archiving tool should therefore indicate in addition to index the full text of each component of an e-mail individually. This separate indexing allows users, administrators and auditors to search for specific criteria over the entire storage cycle - for example, according to internal and external mails, different e-mail addresses per user, mail size, department or distributors. Thus, the discovery of e-mails and annexes on specific issues and projects or to a specific department level no problem. For comprehensive archiving solutions, these criteria not only for the search providers, but also used in the classification, the assignment of retention policies, the pre-filtering of e-mails to categorize, for automatic deletions and hierarchical storage management.
scalability and flexibility
archiving software should cope with high data throughput of several hundred gigabytes
compliance, eDiscovery, and internal policies Since the equality of the e-mail with the traditional Business letter in 2002, all companies are obliged to provide the tax authorities the tax and business-related documents at the request over a period of at least ten years, in some cases even up to thirty years. Can not be demanded e-mails submitted within 100 days of filing a civil suit, a business must expect to pay a fine or imprisonment of up to two years. Also, IT managers must negligent conduct face legal consequences. A rapid retrieval of e-mails not only increases employee productivity, but also saves processing costs and applies substantial economic loss of enterprises.
This can serve e-mail in litigation as evidence, they must, however, clearly a sender can be assigned (authenticity) - by a qualified electronic signature according to the signature law - and it must be ensured that they have not been altered since its creation (integrity ). Therefore requires an archive security features that prevent tampering or accidental deletion of messages. Authentication tools ensure that control who has access to the archive data. Requests and actions to a specific mail must be assigned and tracked. This includes a collection of automated processes such as migration or statutory deletions.
addition should enable the archiving software different policies for data retention in accordance with legal requirements for each communication. The company guarantees that the archives are always up to date and contain only documents that are really needed yet. The policies and retention requirements should be treated proactively in archiving or applied subsequently to a later date, or changed. For a comprehensive monitoring internal and regulatory requirements ensure, through compliance officers in the ideal case, additional modules for audit control and tracking of electronic communications. For administrators, however, reporting functions are important, that they keep track of the number of archived emails and their attachments as well as their size. He also needs to access requirements and service level management and can determine.
scalability and flexibility to buy an e-mail archiving solution is at best a long-term investment - whether small, medium or large companies. Over time, it is the rapid growth of unstructured data to additional requirements come inevitably to space, the number of employees and get you the number of mailboxes or new servers can be purchased. The archiving software should be of these challenges and cope with high data throughput of several hundred gigabytes to meet existing service level agreements or even improve.
This can be ensured by using only the metadata of e-mails stored in relational databases and e-mail data is moved directly from storage media. The result is not only a lean and efficient database, but also a small footprint and short archiving and recovery periods. Similarly, important that the solution supports multiple e-mail systems. So the investment is worthwhile even if is to be integrated in the context of corporate acquisitions, e-mail system of the acquired company into the existing backup strategy.
trend: integrated archiving solution General rule: The e-mail archiving should be seen and be involved in the productive environment of the company as part of the company-wide data protection. Because the migration of data to the archive is in addition to the backup strategy, the recovery requirements and the Datenwiederherstellunsverfahren a key component of information lifecycle management within enterprises. The goal is to provide information research on all types of data about each system and each stage in the information life cycle in context easily and quickly. The trend is therefore away from a separate e-mail, to a combined file and e-mail archiving, which includes, among other things, the long-term storage of all other electronic communications like instant messages or faxes. In addition to a legally compliant archiving of all corporate communication has another advantage: Company archives contain a wealth of information that can be used as a basis for strategic and operational decisions.
Some archiving solutions offer as icing on the cake Therefore, integrated data mining and business intelligence tools to slumbering in the archives of knowledge resources in the form of unstructured data for the company to be identified. For example, the sales department to locate using e-mail usage statistics opportunities to cross and up selling. With the right archiving software that is not only the business risks of non-compliance with regulatory requirements and reduce costs and increase employee productivity - properly a comprehensive e-mail archiving solution also ensures the optimization of business processes.
