* What's your policy for storing e-mails that must be retained?
There is some content in e-mail and, to a lesser extent instant messaging systems, that absolutely must be retained on a long-term basis. For example, as messaging systems are used increasingly for sending purchase orders, signing contracts, negotiating agreements and performing other critical business functions, more and more important content is being stored in messaging systems. As a result, it is becoming ever more important to retain data that organizations might need to satisfy some sort of regulatory requirement, a legal discovery order or just the ability to extract information that decision-makers might want to review at a later date.
However, in our just-published study on e-mail and IM policy management, we discuss the fact that about two-thirds of organizations have no policies or systems in place that can prevent employees from deleting messaging system content that is important for their organizations to retain on a long-term basis. Further, another one in six organizations has only policies in place that require employees not to delete this content. Only one in six organizations actually has policies AND systems in place to ensure that important data is not deleted.
The problem is not that employees are deleting important data willy-nilly – instead, most deletion is simply inadvertent. E-mail users who have mailbox quotas (which is most of them) might delete data simply to make room in their mailbox in order to receive new e-mail, to send e-mail under pressure to satisfy a deadline, etc. Managing a mailbox under quota limitations is a time-consuming task and can lead to deletion of data that the organizations really should keep for long periods. Plus, organizational policies to retain certain types of data can be inconsistently applied by users in the absence of a system that automatically enforces these policies.
How does your organization address this issue? How do you ensure that records in e-mail are kept for the appropriate length and are not deleted early? I would appreciate hearing from you.
