Do you shred your tax returns?

Do you file an income tax return? Do you make a copy of that return before sending it to the IRS, Revenue Canada, HM Revenue and Customs or to whomever you owe income taxes? Do you file that copy in a filing cabinet? After 30 or 60 days, do you remove that copy from your filing cabinet and then run it through your shredder? If your answers are Yes, Yes, Yes and No, then you understand the value of preserving critical business or personal records. If your answers are Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, then you're consistent with the majority of businesses that don't adequately archive their e-mail and other messaging system content.

That’s really the argument for e-mail archiving. A growing proportion of e-mail system content contains valuable business records that you need to keep for one year in some cases, three years in others, seven years, 10 years, indefinitely, etc. However, while you can deploy an archiving system that will begin archiving content starting now, most organizations have backup tapes, disk-based backups, etc. that contain critical business records (Compare Message Archiving products).

To allow all content to be archived – including all the content on backup tapes – AXS-One and RenewData have established a strategic partnership that will permit active archiving of current messaging system content moving forward using AXS-One’s archiving technology, and the processing of old backup tapes using RenewData’s services. 

This service, and those like it, are valuable ones for a couple of reasons. First, from an operational perspective, migrating all data on backup tapes into an archive allows decision makers to determine if there are any business records stored on backup tapes where they would otherwise be very difficult to access. Second, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require organizations to understand what their “inventory” of electronic content is shortly after becoming involved in a legal action (Compare Network Auditing and Compliance products).

The key takeaway is that organizations a) should archive their business records and; b) should migrate content on backup tapes to a more readily accessible format.