E-mail is the backbone of today's business communication.
Everything important to your business goes through your e-mail system sooner or later. If you run a business and you haven't noticed that yet, maybe it's time to saddle up your horse and ride on down the trail while you let somebody else run the business.
While you're at it, you might as well find somebody who understands what e-mail archiving is and why it's just as important to your business as liability insurance.
Many people confuse e-mail archiving with e-mail backup. They are not the same, and neither one does the job of the other. Backups were never intended to meet regulatory requirements or other compliance needs. They serve as a short-term insurance policy to facilitate disaster recovery, assuming they are kept off-site.
Quick, searchable access
E-mail archiving is for retention and discovery. Discovery is the pretrial phase in a lawsuit. E-mail archiving is a way of indexing and storing e-mails that provides quick, searchable access to e-mails and stores them in their original format, which, in order to meet compliance regulations, cannot be altered. Archiving also reduces the strain on your e-mail servers and reduces your storage costs.
There is even more confusion about the laws affecting e-mail archiving. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) govern civil lawsuits in U.S. district courts and apply to every organization that can be sued, including yours.
"Remarkably, most business operators don't realize they must comply with the Federal Regulations on Civil Procedures," wrote Edward Alexi, an IT executive with Tangent Inc. in a 2008 article in ITWorld.com "In this instance, ignorance is far from bliss. It could put you and your organization in serious legal trouble, if the requested electronically stored information (ESI) is not produced when requested by courts."