Email archiving and compliance

January 28 2009 | Jeremy McMaster

There is a big trend in the world of IT focussing on the impotance of email archiving to protect both you and your company from costly legal disputs over alleged communication. There are many solutions in the market space offering the one stop solution to archiving however these products/services can be fairly costly and difficult to implement.

The reality is that most companies running their own email server already have the ability to implement an archiving policy utilizing their current technology and a little discipline.

The policy is really quite simple.

• Leave a copy of all incoming and outgoing email for your organization on your active email server.
• Ensure you have a nightly backup (or more often if required by compliance) of your email server.
• Ensure your backup is stored offsite as a disaster recovery measure.
• Institute a policy to archive emails on the server which or older then X days in age. Depending on the size of your company you may hold emails for one quarter, 6 months, or a year. After X days has passed, all email is archived, stored offsite, and made available to users upon request. This can be made as automated as required with a little bit of tweaking and using online data storage services.

Email archiving has become of paramount importance to any company which corresponds with email. Email can be as powerful and binding as letter mail and thus your ability to show proof of sent email or received email can be extremely important to your business.

To discuss email archiving further please contact Jeremy McMaster, Director IT Services, at 905-628-6010 (ext 106).