Intelligent Enterprise

Maybe all those laws and regulations requiring e-mail to be stored and accessible for long periods of time weren't a curse after all. For what first looked like a lemon — being forced to buy, implement and support e-mail archiving solutions — is already turning into sweet lemonade for many IT shops.

The first advantage is storage management. An e-mail archive can automatically offload data. Instead of interrupting users with frequent "overload alert!" messages and forcing them to spend hours deleting e-mail that they'd rather save, 90-day and older messages and large attachments can be transferred to the archive, while a stub or pointer to the attachment remains in the inbox. Users click on the stub to view the item as they would for any other e-mail, yet these messages won't hog precious inbox storage space.

Global transportation company K-Line Europe, headquartered in London, operated a very small e-mail server, and all 100 employees stored e-mails in personal folders on their hard drives, making messages difficult to back up and secure. One IT employee spent half her time helping people deal with their e-mail folders. The company is now using a centralized e-mail archive solution from Ixos, releasing that IT person to spend her time handling more important tasks. K-Line spent about $37,000 on the system, about the cost of an IT support salary in London. The recovery of that one IT person's time means the solution should pay for itself in less than two years.

A second benefit is the better knowledge management that results from being able to efficiently extract data from the message store for intelligence and reuse. One example of this benefit is "being able to find out what your recently departed marketing manager said to your clients," says Michael Osterman of Osterman Research.

At K-Line Europe, the primary method of communication is e-mail, and questions frequently arise about what terms were offered to a certain vendor, supplier or customer.

"We send quote e-mail to customers with 5-meg Excel spreadsheet attachments containing rate information," says Tim Hawkes, K-Line's systems manager. "Because we didn't have the storage space and had to delete those e-mail messages and attachments, we had no way of referring back to them. Now we can get that information back and prove that we quoted a particular rate."

This history is especially useful when people challenge the company on its rates, claiming they were promised a better deal or that a lower rate was applied to a previous shipment.

The third advantage of e-mail archives is litigation support. If you ever get sued, an archive eases the discovery process, and you also may be able to extract information that will be useful in your defense.

"Just about every government agency gets sued for one thing or another and ends up in litigation," says David Taylor, CIO of the Florida Department of Health. "Many times, judges make a discovery request to produce information including e-mail records. Failure to produce those records could cause you to lose a lawsuit, and it doesn't take [the avoidance of] many million-dollar lawsuits to get the cost of your e-mail archive software back."

A fourth benefit is improved support for business continuity. For instance, a brokerage firm near the World Trade Center that lost its building in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks kept much of its customer data on microfiche. In the aftermath, IT people had to go to colleges, universities and public libraries to look up those records. Having the records, many of them in e-mail format, stored in a digital archive with offsite backup would have eased the company through that difficult time.

Forced into Compliance

Last year, many companies were shocked to learn that they have to save e-mail the way they do any other type of business record. The Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular, released an interpretation of a key rule last May that requires broker/dealers to store all "business as such" communications as electronic records in nonrewriteable format.

"The SEC and NASD are very stringent about their rules for archiving e-mail and instant messages, and they're going to become more strict in the future," Osterman says. "The fines for failure to comply with the various provisions of data retention are substantial."

The various laws and industry guidelines pertaining to financial services call for all business-related e-mail to be stored for three to six years — the first two years in an "easily accessible" format.

Numerous other laws and regulations, including HIPAA, Medicare's Conditions for Participation and the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the ongoing threat of litigation, are gradually forcing companies in other industries to adopt e-mail archiving.

"There are a ton of regulations that apply to data retention that most organizations simply ignore," says Osterman, even going as far back as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires certain types of personnel records to be archived. In another example, the Food and Drug Administration fined a Colorado pharmacy $600,000 for poor recordkeeping under the Controlled Substances Act after a batch of prescription drugs "disappeared." Although many such regulations don't specifically discuss e-mail retention, they do apply to business transactions and communications, which increasingly take the form of e-mail.

The challenge will loom larger as e-mail volumes continue to explode. Volumes have doubled in the last two years, according to the Radicati Group, and IDC predicts 60 billion messages will be sent worldwide in 2006.

Dazed and Confused

There is widespread confusion about which e-mails should be stored. Do you just keep e-mail related to certain transactions? Do you store e-mail to and from certain employees or within specific departments?

The consensus among experts is that you need to save all e-mail that could in any way be considered business records, although only for the retention period stipulated by law, regulation, industry best practices or company policy (with laws and regulations taking precedence). After the appointed retention period, the records should be destroyed (unless you get sued, in which case you must put a hold on the automatic deletion of applicable records). Customer communications are particularly important to hold on to, for compliance and business reasons. It's a good idea to create companywide records retention policies that the entire company is aware of. Then you can enter those rules into your e-mail archive software and have e-mail automatically held for the appropriate period of time.