MXsense Solutions, Inc. today announced an email archiving platform. Delivered as a hosted, software as a service (SaaS) solution, MXsense provides a powerful search engine with built-in indexing and archiving features designed to manage the ever-growing volumes of information and intelligence stored in email communications and attachments.
Today’s article by Ron Miller of Fierce Content Management clarifies the difference between daily backups and email archiving:
Email archiving, on the other hand, involves a system where email is saved, compressed and electronically time stamped. The archiving process removes duplicate data so that you don’t have to store 50 copies of the same attached document (or even 50 copies of the same email with that attachment). There is a clear audit trail and it’s set up in such a way that it cannot be compromised.
The article further outlines the importance of having an email archiving system in place that can stand up to legal scrutiny. According to The Electronic Discovery Law Blog, a judge ordered a company to “not only produce a set of electronic records, but to explain the process by which they were maintained.”
Maybe its time to take a closer look at your email archiving policy, process and toolset to ensure your company is not vulnerable.
College and university students are increasingly using social media tools and email to manage their academic and personal lives on and off campus.
According to Nicholas Carr’s recent blog post, “The Email Monster,” Amherst College is managing approximately 180,000 inbound emails each day — all from a student population of 1,600. One of the interesting aspects of this figure is that 94 percent of the email are spam, further exascerbating the college’ storage infrastructure.
The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone’s personal data warehouse.
As Carr points out, as email continues burden organizations, many will consider outsourcing this vital function. If they do, the need to offer archiving and indexing tools to search for pertinent information will be essential.
Yet another email snafu. Oracle Corporation is the latest company to illustrate the need for email archiving. Acording to a Bloomberg report today, Oracle’s Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison:
deliberately destroyed or withheld e-mails and failed to preserve tape recordings that should have been turned over to lawyers for shareholders suing him, a judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said that email, as well as 135 hours of recorded interviews from March 2001 to August 2002 were willfully witheld.
Organizations of all sizes rely on email to conduct business. For most, email has become a primary source of communication, capturing important information and organically growing into a vital knowledge base that can be used for a range of business purposes.
Intentional or not, failure to produce email records when prompted for legal discovery is not tolerated by the courts as evidenced in this Oracle case.
Beyond e-discovery, email archiving offers significant benefits for organizations and their employees. Everything from having on-demand access to a searchable index of all email for employees and make them more productive, to IT resource optimization, storage management, backup and business continuity.
The legal jousting between the White House and a U.S. district judge over email records offered a new technical twist. According to an eWeek article last week, Judge John Facciola requested that the Bush administration collect and preserve all email in PST. file format.
Industry experts cite the vulnerability of this approach as .PST files are easily corruptible and can be altered.
Political, legal, technical or otherwise, there is no excuse for email archiving ignorance. You need to think about your organization’s policy and process, and implement a system that will enable you to mitigate your risk.
What if you were subpoenaed today?
