| Regulatory Compliance |
| Litigation Support |
| Mailbox Management |
| Knowledge Management |
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Why should you archive your electronic communications? |
 Regulatory Compliance
› A major reason that companies decide to archive their electronic communications in an easy-to-retrieve format is to comply with regulatory directives and laws. Any company which falls under the category of a Broker-Dealer is required by the SEC (as well as the NYSE and NASD in most cases) to archive their electronic communications for three years, two of which must be in a quickly retrievable format. An industry group that has become very interested in archive solutions is hedge funds. While currently unregulated by federal agencies, there has been much discussion in the US Congress as well as the SEC that some regulation of these entities is required. Electronic communication retention will clearly be one of the first criteria of any new regulations.
› The Sarbanes-Oxley Act extends the need to retain electronic communications to any public company beginning in 2006. Any public company that cannot produce their electronic communications quickly and completely to federal regulators or judges risk fines, sanctions, and/or default judgments.
Litigation Support
› Most companies of any size or importance can expect to be involved in civil litigations. Judges expect, and demand, that companies produce their documents, including electronic communications on a timely basis. Those who are unable to comply with these court orders face fines, sanctions and/or default judgments. Public companies are especially at risk given that they are required by Federal Law to have these records available.
› Companies that expect to rely on backup media, whether they are tapes or disk, to retrieve electronic communications data quickly find
themselves with a time-consuming and expensive dilemma. Backup media is created for the purpose of restoring a system to a given state at a particular point in time. Civil litigations will typically be
searching electronic communication records over months or even years of time. The search criteria will often include keyword searching, which from backup media implies reading every character of
every email over the time range. Companies often find themselves settling cases with unfavorable terms simply to avoid the cost of electronic discovery.
› Through the use of an electronic communication archive, electronic discovery can take minutes or hours instead of months at a near zero cost
Mailbox Management
› Many companies are finding that a fast growing expense of their IT organizations is the upgrading of their email server
farms to support the ever growing body of email retained by employees on their mail servers. Once a firm has deployed an email archive they can set strict quotas on mailboxes using either size or email
age as a criteria. Employees can then use the retrieval methods of the email archive to reproduce any email sent or received in the past. Many companies
find that the payback period of acquiring and deploying an email archive can be as little as three months, just in reduced server, storage and upgrade costs on their mail plant. Archive products that provide
seamless integration with the Outlook mail client, and support mailbox management for MS-Exchange and/or IMAP mailbox servers are especially easy to integrate into the employees’ workflow processes.
Knowledge Management
› For most organizations, more than 80% of their business is at least partially conducted through electronic communications. An email archive contains vast amounts of knowledge concerning an enterprise’s clients, employees and their interactions. Archive products that contain integrated data mining and reporting capabilities allow clients to mine the gems of knowledge from the sea of unstructured data that makes up electronic communications. Many companies use their archives to monitor communications between their sales/marketing staff and their clients. Others use it to monitor compliance with internal policies such as inappropriate use of email, Chinese wall violations, and inadequate/inaccurate data sent outside of the firm.
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