Email Archiving: What's required of K-12 schools?
Print
Download PDF
Meeting internal and external needs for message retrieval
Overview
No matter the organization type, today's business communication relies heavily on email and instant messaging. As a result, managing the data for easy retrieval is necessary on several levels: to comply with regulations, to respond to lawsuits, and to manage organizational knowledge.
Yet the volume of email alone makes retention and storage a daunting task. In 2007, IDC predicted that nearly 97 billion emails, with 40+ billion attributed to spam messages, would be sent daily worldwide ("IDC Reveals the Future of Email as It Navigates through a Resurgence of Spam and Real-Time Market Substitutes," April 9, 2007). Historically, storage demands have been met with backup tape. However, backup tapes are not easily searched—creating expensive disruptions when a message needs to be retrieved. Attachments and growing message size create more difficulties for efficient search and retrieval.
Email archiving that encompasses all inbound, outbound, and internal email and instant messages ensures storage, search, and retrieval that minimize both costs and staff time.
Industry Distinctions
Backup: preserves data against failure or disaster, not for accessing data in its raw state
Archive: securely preserves data for easy access in a non-production environment
Why email archiving should be implemented
Regulations. In December 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were amended to cover "electronically stored information" (ESI) and address five broad areas: (1) the parties' obligations to meet and confer about electronic discovery early in litigation; (2) discovery of information that is not reasonably accessible and allocating costs of that discovery; (3) privilege review; (4) form of production; and (5) sanctions.
Among the changes,
Rule 34(a) is amended to confirm that discovery of electronically stored information stands on equal footing with discovery of paper documents.
Rule 26(b)(2) "requires parties to identify sources of information that are not searched because they are not reasonably accessible and allows discovery from such sources on a showing of good cause, subject to judicial supervision," writes Lee H. Rosenthal, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas.
These changes, of course, directly impact any organization involved in federal litigation. Similar changes are being made by state governments as well. Specifically, FRCP Rule 26(b)(2) requires that the school district assemble an inventory of its various document and data storage systems to determine whether the documents must be disclosed. Upon "showing of good cause" for disclosure, most emails would need to be produced in their original form and include information such as file owner, creation date, routing details, sender, receiver and subject line.
Unfortunately, searching traditional tape backups for requested data can be a costly endeavor. One California school district estimated the cost at $20,000 after discovering it would need to re-build a replaced Exchange Server 2000 in order to retrieve and read the data stored on tape. Having a email archiving solution in place protects organizations from incurring such costs.
Lawsuits. Any court of law can request data or information relevant to a lawsuit. Then again, sometimes the right email can thwart a potential lawsuit. In either case, plucking some messages out of the email haystack can be easy or hard. The digital originals will be critical since once an email is sent, the sender has virtually no control over what happens to it. Without knowledge or consent, that email can be printed, forwarded to others, edited, and changed dramatically.
Organizations can protect themselves against unwarranted claims by establishing policies and procedures that capture inbound, outbound, and internal email messages as business records. Regrettably, without email archiving in place, the cost of producing the needed information can outweigh the damages claimed.
Knowledge management. Email has become a part of the organizational knowledge base by virtue of the vast amount of intelligence that is not replicated in any other data. Michael Osterman, president of messaging and collaboration research firm Osterman Research, believes "companies will see the value of email as a source of knowledge increasing, primarily because this will be one of the key secondary benefits that organizations derive after they have deployed an archiving solution."
Email Archiving Key Benefits
Respond to legal requests more efficiently
Save costs and staff time
Leverage archived email as a knowledge store
Lower risk and exposure
Lightspeed Systems's Message Journaling ensures compliance and more.
Compliance rests on three prongs: unaltered email retention, security, and auditability. Implementation requires functionality, ease of use, and affordability. Lightspeed Systems can provide it all.
"Digital Original" Retention. Through inline security servers and hooks in the email servers, original emails and attachments are indexed and stored for the number of years determined necessary by organizational policy.
Security. Database access is limited to designated individuals with proper credentials for searching and retrieving messages.
Auditability. Messages from all email servers on the network may be searched through a central, web-accessible interface.
Powerful Functionality
- imports all email into the archive upon setup
- may be searched even when email service is down
- rapidly retrieves recent email kept in a separate index (e.g., last 60 days)
- with daily updates, scans for and eliminates viruses
Ease of use
- enable basic end-user searches on sender, recipient, subject, and date range
- extended administrator searches on keywords, attachments, meta info, body text, and "suspicious phrases"
- "Retrieve Mail" link on every report allows quick, easy forwarding
-
tightly integrates with
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
- Novell GroupWise
- POP3
Affordability
- it's free with the Total Traffic Control network security suite that includes Internet filtering, spam blocking, anti-virus, bandwidth management, and detailed reporting
- to save space, if the same attachment is sent to multiple recipients, it is intuitively saved only once
"After setting the policy to archive email for two years, Lightspeed's Message Journaling puts the district on solid ground for any future inquiries," says Mark McMurray, Frenchtown School District technology coordinator.
For more information:
An Overview of the E-Discovery Rules Amendments, The Yale Law Journal
FRCP amendments text and committee notes