Why you need to have e-mail archiving

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.

Suppose someone sues you claiming discrimination or harassment between them and your manager four years ago and continuing for six months. The court will request all related records for those six months and you have 30 days to provide them.

If you did not have a dedicated e-mail archiving solution in place during that time, you will not be able to provide them in 30 days, if at all. The court will assume you have something to hide and rule accordingly.

There is precedent for this scenario and it can be exceedingly expensive, in both financial and public relations terms. Remember, saved or backed-up e-mails don't count because they can be changed and you won't be able to find them all anyway. Using the Microsoft Exchange 2010 program's archiving capabilities won't cut it, either. If you don't believe that, ask Microsoft.

There are additional e-mail regulations that may or may not apply to your organization: the HIPAA Act of 1996 for health care; SEC Rule 17A-4 for brokers and dealers; FINRA for the financial industry and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 for publicly held companies.

In essence, it's similar to car insurance: There's no law that says you have to have comprehensive and collision -- and it works just fine to save money by not buying that coverage -- until you have an accident and a $30,000 repair bill on your $40,000 vehicle. Then you'll wish you'd insured yourself against such a loss.

Most small businesses can install an easy-to-use, dedicated e-mail archiving system in about an hour for $5,000 to $10,000, depending on how many e-mail users they have. Just like your auto insurance, if something goes wrong, you'll wish you'd had this covered.

On the other hand, if you're saddling up that horse, you're not in the 21st century, anyway. So let your manager do his or her job and don't worry about it.