Email Archiving
Email archiving is the act of preserving, and making searchable, all email to/from an individual. Email archiving solutions capture email content, either directly from the email application itself, or during transport. The messages are typically then stored on magnetic disk storage, and indexed to simplify future searches.
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BENEFITS
Safeguard Intellectual Property
Background: Gartner estimates that about 45% of an organization’s emails provide some business value because they are related to a project, an initiative or are considered an official record.1 It’s critical to protect this valuable asset—not just to preserve institutional knowledge against employee turnover, but to assure that emails cannot be accidentally (or deliberately) deleted by your employees. What’s more, Osterman Research estimates that email storage needs are growing at 31% annually2. If your email is hosted on-premise, the costs of storing your intellectual property will rise astronomically over the life of your business.
How Email Archiving helps: It ensures that the value of your company’s intellectual property is maintained in perpetuity. By capturing every email as it’s sent or received, it ensures a 100% accurate repository, even if an employee deletes an individual email or an entire PST file. It also gives employees the power to recover emails that they may have accidentally lost.
1 Gartner, Best Practices for Using Email Archiving to Eliminate PST and Mailbox Quota Headaches, September 2012
2 Osterman Research, Content Archiving Market Trends, 2011-2014
Speed eDiscovery
Background: If your business is implicated in a lawsuit or other legal action, a court may order discovery of your email records and relevant information. Without an easily searchable archive, you may be forced to dedicate considerable time and resources to comply with a Discovery order. And because many statutes require data to be stored for 2 to 7 years, a court will show little flexibility if your data is unavailable or inaccessible. Failure to comply could result in steep fines and negatively impact your business.
How Email Archiving helps: Osterman Research estimates that 35% of the total cost of litigation is represented by eDiscovery.3 But with Matrix Communications’s Email Archiving, you can cut your risk and cut the costs of complying with discovery requests. Not only are your emails preserved and protected for the lifetime of your business, but it’s simple to recover and produce emails to comply with legal requests or audits.
3 Osterman Research, The Growing Importance of E-Discovery on Your Business
Facilitate Compliance
Background: While every industry offers unique regulatory challenges, many industries are required by legislation to comply with long-term data management regulations. Compliance is often determined on three factors: security (data must be safeguarded against all threats to its integrity); permanence (data must be retained in its original state without being altered); and auditability (data must be accessible in a timely manner when required.)
How Email Archiving helps: Matrix Communications’s Email Archiving offers security, permanence and auditability that meets stringent compliance guidelines across a variety of industries and government agencies. Our solutions comply with regulations from FRCP, SEC, GLBA, HIPAA, HITECH, SOX, and more.
Details About Specific Regulations
The rules for email are clear: FRCP, SOX, HIPAA, FINRA, GLB, NYSE, NASD, and SEC regulations all require nearly every company to maintain a complete and easily accessible archive.
While there are over 1,000 different federal, state and local regulations, an organization is typically required to store their email in tamperproof, redundant and easily accessible archives for 3-7 years. Failure to comply can lead to costly fines and penalties.
Specific compliance requirements
Here are some of the specific regulations that may apply to your business.
- FINRA. FINRA pertains primarily to financial services. Under these rules, correspondence of emails to the public pertaining to the firm’s business—whether it is generated from the home, office or elsewhere—is subject to provision.
- SEC. Mainly parallel to FINRA rules and pertaining to financial services, SEC rules require specific requirements for broker dealers. SEC Rule 17a-4 requires brokers and dealers to preserve their email for at least six years.
- FRCP. The 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require all organizations, large or small, to maintain complete archives with ESI that is readily accessible in the event of litigation.
- HIPAA.All healthcare organizations must take steps to simplify and standardize electronic data exchange, and protect the confidentiality and security of all electronic health data managed by the organization.
- HIPAA requires healthcare companies to preserve email messages and attachments containing patient health status, medical care, treatments, etc.
- Each instance of HIPAA email compliance failure is punishable up to seven-figure fines, criminal charges and even jail time.
- SOX. All public companies are required to show governance and security controls for financial information. All information transmitted via email; revenue sheets, finance updates, and even internal notes, must be protected in a compliant manner. If a company fails to meet SOX requirements, heavy fines are imposed.
Matrix Communications’s Email Archiving keeps you compliant
Matrix Communications’s Email Archiving automatically captures 100% of your inbound and outbound emails for preservation, protection and recovery. It assures compliance with the above regulations. It also eases eDiscovery by making it easy to perform comprehensive search requests for audits, litigation, or internal queries.