Electronic Discovery Navigator

Benefits of E-mail Archiving

Benefits of E-mail Archiving

"Recent research has shown that even though e-mail archiving was once thought of as being used only by public companies or financial services firms, proper e-mail archiving practices can benefit businesses of all sizes and industries.
 
More and more businesses are now using archiving for storage management, to monitor employee communications and for disaster recovery. The question now is, “Can your business afford to be without an archiving system?”
 
According to Burlington, Mass.-based 123Together.com, there are many benefits and uses for e-mail archiving, such as archiving for employee communication monitoring.
 
Probably not a favorite use among employees, monitoring workers’ communication is usually used in legal proceedings which request e-mail evidence in association with an employees’ violation of corporate e-mail policies and misuse of business e-mail."

Five best practices for your email archive

Five best practices for your email archive

"Here are some best practices and strategies to follow when choosing and implementing an email archiving tool:

1. Seek buy-in from the legal/compliance team and business leaders when selecting an email archiving technology and setting retention policies.
Legal counsel/compliance officers know the regulations and requirements applying to the length of time the electronic data must be kept. Business managers know any special policies that need to be taken into account, such as product warranties.

2. Grant few, if any, exceptions to email archiving policies.
Exceptions can open the door for opposing counsel to challenge the validity of the information discovered in connection with a lawsuit."

Exchange archiving for storage optimization

Exchange archiving for storage optimization

"There are numerous benefits associated with archiving Microsoft Exchange e-mail data. For example, archiving facilitates litigation searches and e-discovery, allows for more complete journaling, and provides storage benefits for both mailboxes and the storage devices themselves.  In this article, I will focus on the latter -- how archiving can be used for storage optimization.

Reducing storage costs is the most common motivation for e-mail archiving. In fact, 90% of deployments I have been involved with were solely implemented for storage savings.  However, storage savings mean different things to different people.  For some, it means compressing e-mail to reduce licensing and storage hardware costs.  For others it’s creating a “bottomless mailbox” for end users.  For the purposes of this article, it will mean both."

Understanding Archiving Requirements: Seven Guiding Principles For A Defensible And Compliant Infrastructure Strategy

Understanding Archiving Requirements: Seven Guiding Principles For A Defensible And Compliant Infrastructure Strategy

" From the GC to the CIO down to the storage administrator, there has been no lack of discussion on new rules for managing data and electronic documents. Everything from regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure has made IT aware that they need to be ready to archive more data longer. Yet the most common refrain heard is: "I know I need to do something, just someone tell me what I specifically have to do." How do you cut through the fog, and develop specific technical requirements for saving, managing and deleting data in an archival system? Despite confusion, archiving of data can actually be broken down into fundamental requirements.

Requirement 1: Need To Save All Types Of Data

The most common question asked: What electronic documents and data need to be saved? Only "official records," or documents, files, e-mail, instant messages? The answer to all of these is at various times: yes. Both regulators and especially the courts are expecting organizations to produce (hence have preserved or saved) a wide range of documents. All types of "electronically stored information" (commonly abbreviated ESI) are discoverable. It is important to note that from a regulatory or legal perspective, there is little discrimination of a document based on its medium.

These business and legal drivers create some clear archival requirements IT can follow:

Archiving systems need to be flexible and capable to handle many types of document media - Storage systems used for archiving need to be capable of handling a variety of electronic documents media, including e-mail, instant messages, files, etc

Archiving systems need to be capable of capturing both "official" records as well as "unofficial" documents - Archiving systems need the flexibility to handle input not only from official record and document retention systems, but also electronically stored information from a number of other systems."

Agility Is Key as Email Archiving Evolves at JP Morgan

Agility Is Key as Email Archiving Evolves at JP Morgan

"Financial services and banking giant JP Morgan has had to be agile in dealing with its email archiving system. The company swapped out one system because it did not meet its requirements, saw its vendor acquired twice, and now is getting ready to move its archiving system from one email system to a new one. Such experiences can be common in the rapidly emerging but turbulent email archiving market.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. was founded in 1799 and is one of the nation's oldest financial services firms. The company has more than 200,000 employees, offices in about 100 counties, and $2.3 trillion in assets.

Because of the nature of its business, the corporation has been at the forefront of the email archiving. "Industry regulations require that we be able to monitor electronic communication among our regulated users, such as stockbrokers and private bankers, and their clients," says Lance Livingston, lead engineer at JP Morgan. The company has to be sure that brokers and traders are providing consistent information about stocks to customers or else it can be censured by regulators.

If the company did not closely monitor communications, it could face fines of as much as $10 million. Consequently, the financial services entity has been able to justify the $100,000 annual maintenance tag that comes with its email archiving system."

Interest Grows in Email Archiving Services

Interest Grows in Email Archiving Services

"Like other segments of the software market, there is movement in email archiving to offer archiving services as a replacement for or a companion to traditional archiving systems. These services are usually offered under the SaaS, or software-as-a-service, label. And there is growing interest in these archiving services among companies that are looking to relieve overburdened IT staff or those that are seeking more features and functionality than they can afford to buy with tight budgets for new technology systems.

"Small and medium-sized businesses are becoming more interested in email archiving services, and SaaS is a good option for them," says Michael Osterman, principal analyst with Osterman Research , which expects these services to account for about two thirds of total archiving market revenues of $1.5 billion in 2011, compared to about one third of a $609 million market in 2008."

MailArchiva Announces Availability on Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris Operating System

MailArchiva Announces Availability on Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris Operating System

"MailArchiva today announced that its flagship product line, MailArchiva has completed successful validation of the OpenSolaris(TM) Operating System (OS). Thousands of organizations around the world leverage MailArchiva's email archiving capabilities to address a broad range of business needs -- from regulatory compliance to mail server performance improvements, data accessibility and ediscovery.

As both enterprise systems and open source leaders, Sun and MailArchiva have much in common and, according to CEO and founder of MailArchiva Jamie Band, "validating MailArchiva on the OpenSolaris platform means Sun customers have a new, cost effective alternative to meet their archiving requirements."

"MailArchiva's commercial open source Enterprise Edition enables organizations of all kinds to take their investment in Sun technology a step further, and satisfy their email archiving requirements," said Juan Carlos Soto, vice president of global market development and engineering at Sun Microsystems. "We're pleased to have MailArchiva's archiving solution available on the industry's best open source platform, the OpenSolaris OS.'"

The searchable solution

The searchable solution

"Jorgensen reviewed a number of email archiving systems including GFI Mail Archiver, Sunbelt Software USA's Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) and Symantec Enterprise Vault, but the front runner was ArcMail Defender.

Dean Richardson, chief marketing officer, ArcMail Technology.“Email archiving is keeping a copy of every single email that comes into or leaves an organization. In real time, any time a message is sent or received through their mail system, we archive and index and make it searchable — quickly,” says Dean Richardson (right), chief marketing officer, ArcMail Technology.

Richardson says that ArcMail Technology's value proposition to the market is that ArcMail Defender is, by comparison, “easy to buy, easy to install, easy to manage, easy to use.”

While evaluating email archiving solutions on the market, Jorgenson was impressed with ArcMail Technology's live web-demonstration of how the product works. He saw that email could be searched by subject, sender, recipient, attachment name. Also, users can search for emails within a date range or search for full-text. The system is, “very straightforward, very upfront,” Jorgenson says. Cost, ease of use and the end user experience were all factors in Jorgenson's choice in picking ArcMail Defender.

The cost of the product depends on the amount of storage a company needs. Sacred Heart went with an eight-terabyte unit, which cost them $24,000. As for how long that unit will sustain them — if Sacred Heart's employees use reasonably light email — each employee contributing 20 emails a day at 25 kilobytes per email, the unit will sustain them for about 20 years, Richardson says."

The Law Requires Email Archiving

The Law Requires Email Archiving

"According to industry experts, approximately 90% of the day's business communications are performed via email or by way of unsecured instant messages. Communications including unstructured data can clog up an organizations network bandwidth and take up great amounts of storage space. The volume of emails and similar data forms in most businesses double every 12 to 18 months.

It begs the questions: What do I do with all of that data? For most organizations, the data has been backed-up to tapes or in the worst case scenario deleted from centralized repositories within email and database servers. After the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedures were passed in December of 2006, all emails, communications, files, directives and requests that may be relevant to a current or future litigation cannot simply be deleted or overwritten. The data must be produced and thus it must be archived, because that's the law."

Taking email archiving to another level with GFI MailArchiver 6

Taking email archiving to another level with GFI MailArchiver 6

"A new version of GFI MailArchiver for Exchange, an email management and archiving solution, is being released today. GFI MailArchiver 6 integrates with Microsoft’s Outlook email client to allow users to access their archived email faster and in a more transparent manner. GFI MailArchiver is the first email archiving product to offer integration with Outlook without the use of stub files. This reduces the load on the Exchange Server while greatly reducing client complexity issues and administration. With Microsoft discouraging the use of stubs in email archiving products, it was an easy decision for GFI not to use stub files as other email archiving vendors are doing and to take an innovative and more effective approach.

GFI MailArchiver is the leading archiving solution for SMBs. Shipping at the lowest price on the market, the software archives all corporate email, reduces dependency on troublesome PST files, permits employees to access old and deleted emails at any time and from any location and helps companies meet eDiscovery and legal compliance requirements.

A first choice product for many small and medium sized businesses, GFI MailArchiver 6 now allows end-users to search and access all their old and deleted emails from a folder in their Outlook email client. Integration with Outlook means that archived email can be assessed from Outlook as if it were their Exchange mailbox or local PST file. GFI MailArchiver users can now enjoy a faster and improved experience than those using stubs."