Let's Talk About Email Archiving And Compliance

By Author: Audrian Cambell
Total Articles: 81
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It's no secret that the new regulatory environment stands as one of the major contributing factors behind the immense popularity of hosted email archival solutions. A recent estimation states that more than 10,000 compliance regulations have been typically enacted throughout the world. In fact the big name Morgan Stanley was even fined $15 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission back in the year 2006. As an obvious result more stringent controls as well as severe penalties are forcing big, small and mid-sized organizations to address their corporate email storage and regulatory compliance rather seriously.


Let's take a look at the Washington Post here. It clearly states that SEC has alleged that Morgan Stanley has delayed in handing over their corporate communications and has misled the SEC investigators by not complying with the government's request for documents. The case thus highlights the tough stand of the Government and also clearly points out that law will definitely take its course, if companies fail to produce their email and other digital business correspondence if and when required. ... href="http://datacove.net/email_archive_ir.php">Email archiving and compliance has become the popular buzzword of the era.


As business emails have become the most significant form of correspondence, industry regulators and governments thus have also upgraded the requirements for message retention and storage. No wonder, email is a state of the art record keeping format for electronic communication however the ease of deletion makes it rather vulnerable. For the greater reasons of protecting these records, regulators have therefore implemented a benchmark for email record keeping standards.


Although these standards are case specific and varies from one industry to other however it almost universally addresses two significant Key Elements such as:

The type of messages which are to be retained.
How long the messages should be retained.

There has been quite a deal of confusion regarding the kind of email messages which are to be stored. However, most legislation has described the retention of 'digital business communication' as mandatory. Many high profile cases regarding email storage and regulatory compliance thus have prompted the regulators to specify that any business that alters/ misleads/deletes or destroys their email records can be held criminally liable. As a result organizations are depending on the hosted email storage software for storing and retaining their all business related digital communication.


Yet another key element of archiving legislation is the 'Retention period'. Typically this retention period dramatically depends on industry and country and in most of the cases it ranges from 3-7 years.


Hosted email archiving and compliance: Manifold benefits


Compliance: If your organization is legally required to retain all the business digital correspondence for a defined period then the cloud based email storage software can enable you in meeting these requirements. Sure messages can be retained for a mutually agreed upon time and old messages could be deleted automatically once the retention period gets expired.


Central search: A hosted email archival in place also helps you to centralize your critical emails and also provides an easy way to search and locate your important correspondence.


Archive reporting: Hosted email archival solution also enables you to view your archived messages even when there is a network failure. As a matter of fact, wherever and whenever you want you can actually log in and see how many messages have been archived, what the period is and what size the archive has reached.


The best part is email archiving and compliance services on cloud nine are pretty flexible and is totally based on your requirements such as retention periods, secure access etc.


Author's Bio


Audrian Cambell has been a company head and he knows how email archiving and compliance works to help you maintain your emails storage and makes your job fast and easier. In this article, he shares his knowledge about how email storage software helps in the efficient management of data.