* Archiving's benefits go well beyond regulatory compliance
I received the following comment from one of our survey panel members:
“It intrigues me in that I have always felt that e-mail archiving software’s main purpose should be to help in alleviating data storage concerns. But all the talk and discussion for the last few years has been about HIPPA / SBO [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act / Sarbanes-Oxley].”
As I’ve discussed in this column before, archiving’s benefits go well beyond just regulatory compliance or support for an organization’s legal discovery efforts. In fact, if an organization completely ignores regulatory records retention requirements and never gets sued, and so never even thinks about legal discovery, it can still obtain a variety of benefits from an e-mail archiving system. In addition to such a system’s ability to significantly reduce, or at least slow the growth of, storage requirements, e-mail archiving can serve several other functions, including:
* The ability to investigate your organization’s e-mail traffic to understand how users employ e-mail, who is sending and receiving e-mail from which parties, who in your organization is sending e-mail to your competitors, and so forth. Products like Waterford Technologies’ MailMeter MBA, for example, can allow administrators or compliance officers to drill down into e-mail traffic to look for policy violations, suspicious behavior and the like.
* Act as a disaster recovery system. By replicating the contents of an archive in near real time in a geographically separate area, an organization can establish the core of a robust disaster recovery system that will minimize downtime in the event of a hurricane, tornado, earthquake or power outage.
* Serve as the core of a knowledge management system that will preserve corporate information.
In short, while e-mail archiving has traditionally been implemented to address compliance requirements, and while legal discovery is a growing driver for the adoption of archiving, there are plenty of reasons to deploy archiving that have nothing to do with regulations or discovery.
