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Thứ Sáu, 15 tháng 4, 2011

Improving your approach to email retention

By Robert E. Jones


"Keep everything" has long been a mantra in the field of email archiving, but is this really the safest and most efficient course of action? The findings of a recent presentation at LegalTech in New York suggest it isn't. Gartner's presentation highlighted some of the difficulties businesses have run into because of the inflexibility of some email archiving solutions' retention policies.

For some organizations, beginning with a "keep everything forever" strategy has proven disastrous. But how do you approach the matter of setting retention periods and deleting selected data? First of all, it is important to take legal advice.

We are able to offer a certain amount of guidance because of our experience in email archiving, but ultimately it will be the responsibility of your legal counsel to sanction your policy as far as your industry is concerned. ARMA is an excellent resource for information on information management standards and best practices, so it is worth visiting them at www.arma.org

As an introduction, data can be categorized in terms of - business records - temporary business information (for instance, draft documents) - personal communication (employees and their friends/partners) - transitory conversations (here's today's meeting agenda, let's meet up for lunch)

A progressive policy based email archiving product lets you determine whether or not all this data needs importing. After all, how significant is a 5 year old PST? Why should you increase your storage requirement, run the risk of liability and expend huge amounts of time and effort only to import unnecessary data? An advanced archiving product will allow data to be processed automatically before it makes it into the archive instead of obliging you to archive everything before it is actioned.

An email retention policy of only keeping business records should reduce the amount of data being stored. Then your decision is how long you keep it. That depends on where you are, your industry (vertical market), regulatory compliance procedures and your legal advisors.




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