Email Archiving Policy

In several regulated industries, an email archiving policy is necessary to show the company is complying with industry standards.

Even if a company does not participate in a regulated industry, it is nonetheless best to have policies for archiving emails in place so information can be retrieved when needed by a court under the Federal Rules of Civil Disclosure in 2006.

An email archiving policy should be the foundation of every organization’s email archiving strategy. No two policies for archiving emails will ever be the exact same, so every one must set out its goal, the laws the policy is governed by and the retention times for each email type, the procedure for deleting emails and state when the retention times of theirs have expired. Generally there ought to be a summary and list of personnel accountable for implementing and enforcing the email archiving policy included with this.

Email Archiving Policies

Typically you will find two informal kinds of policies for archiving email messages along with one formal email type archiving policy. The informal policies often save all email or perhaps allow user discretion. While compliance officers will probably fear the casual policy types, each one has the benefits. For instance, a save-all policy indicates there is no chance of a legal violation and personal discretion policies allow a lot of granular categorization.

Nevertheless, each comes with some negatives as a save-all policy will need continuous expansion of storage space and also have improved authorized risks when email information is non compliant, while a personal discretion email archiving policy will allow human error and lacks oversight or control. For these reasons, most organizations implement an organized email archiving policy that records all the controls and also users retention periods to be automatically set.

With structured policies email is given an instantly set retention time based on the email type of its. Email management is simplified, information retrieval is accelerated, so the expense of email archiving is reduced. The one likely downside associated with a structured formal policy is it takes co operation between IT, legal, financial and HR to achieve common objectives.

Businesses may also be forced to look at their email archiving policies for GDPR compliance to make sure they comply with the information minimization and storage limitation principles. This will probably include assessing what private information of EU citizens is held in a contact database, archiving some data present in an existing database, and determining lawful grounds for the continued retention and processing of the information. The evaluation must be repeated periodically and policies and procedures adjusted as necessary.

Evaluating Email Archiving Solutions

Email archiving solutions are available in a number of different formats, but you will find some characteristics that a program must have in order to comply with different laws and rules. For instance, the Federal Rules of Civil Disclosure stipulate that messages provided in eDiscovery should be immutable and accurate. What this means is that, to be compliant, an archiving solution should copy email information in real time, not periodically, and also have mechanisms available to stop the modification of archived data. A tamper-proof archive should be maintained.

Cloud-based solutions additionally resolve possible storage space issues and their associated costs. As email data accumulates, businesses utilizing hardware or maybe software based remedies might need to add extra devices, reassign servers or perhaps migrate data offsite.

These additional expenses are not present with cloud based remedies, as they are generally charged per consumer without any cap on the quantity of storage space.