E-mail systems contain large amounts of critical business data, including records of dealings with clients, purchase orders, contracts, proposals and the like. Unified communication systems - which include voicemail, faxes and other content - contain even more critical business content.
Can you prevent your employees from deleting this data?
We have just completed a major new study focused on messaging archiving and document management and a key finding was an answer to that question.
We found that 44% of organizations have no policies in place to prevent employees from deleting important content, while another 34% have only policies in place to protect this data. That means that only 22% of midsized and large organizations in North America have systems and policies in place to protect their critical business records. (Compare Message Archiving products)
That means that nearly four out of five organizations are vulnerable on a variety of levels. If they’re dragged into court for a wrongful termination suit, they might not be able to produce the e-mails that could exonerate the manager that fired the suing employee. If a new marketing manager takes over, she might not be able to peruse her predecessor’s commitments to the company’s key clients. If a regulator needs to examine a company’s compliance with statutory requirements for data preservation, it might not be able to satisfy that data request. If users lose important business data, they will likely have to re-create it or just do without. (Compare Network Auditing and Compliance products)
In short, without an archiving system or some other capability to preserve critical business data reliably for long periods, an organization is vulnerable on a number of levels and faces legal, regulatory or productivity losses that, in some cases, can be substantial.