Solving the Problem

Companies must walk a narrow course between the expensive and risky extremes of email management: neither keeping all message stores (strains storage and management resources; preserves smoking guns) nor deleting email without a strict retention policy (violates regulatory laws; invites litigation). Ideally companies will assess their email records situation, generate intelligent business policies, communicate the policies to all end-users, and use email management applications to archive, manage, audit, restore and delete messaging data. Primary messaging compliance objectives would include:

* Instituting effective back-up and restore procedures.

* Initially capturing and storing all email, TM and attachments.

* Basing retrieval capabilities on primary index values such as unique message ID, date, from, to, subject line, and combinations.

* Providing full-text search capabilities against message text as well as attachments.

* Scheduling deletions according to compliance timelines.

* Preserving regulated data on non-rewritable, nonerasable formats (an important provision of the SEC regulations).

* Automatically verifying the quality and accuracy of the archiving process.

* Offering full audit capability of the email archives.

Sadly, current email technology is not optimized for email retention and few corporate systems are capable of doing it well. The world's largest corporate messaging applications--Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell's GroupWise--provide few native resources for compliance and retention operations. (A primary example of this is Exchange's own developer Microsoft, who did bother deleting the smoking gun emails that made them look like pirates in anti-trust court.)

Several vendors offer email management software to the SOHO and mid-sized markets, but enterprise-level packages are rare. (Enterprise-level packages that work with all three major email applications are non-existent.) One increasingly popular package is Exchange Archive Solution (EAS) from EDUCOM TS. EAS archives multiple MS Exchange email stores to NAS and SAN and compresses the archived messages. Users can access, search and restore archived mail and perform compliance audits. Tivoli's Storage Manager for Mail manages both Exchange and Notes, while developers AXSOne, C2C and KVS offer similar applications. Storage hardware vendors are also getting into the act: EMC partners with EDUCOM to manage mail on their Celerra storage device while others develop their own email management suites. NetApp's Enterprise Vault, for example, manages Exchange data stores on NetApp Filers.

By managing message stores throughout their lifecycle, companies can establish email retention policies, protect corporate intellectual property, increase information retrieval speed, and reduce expensive email server overload. And maybe save themselves from a whopping big judgment or two.

www.bouldercorporation.com

www.cohasset.com

www.educomts.com.

www.ironmountain.com

Here is a breakdown of the primary regulatory body or regulation that applies to email retention at a variety of otherwise-regulated industries and general business.

* Banking: FDIC, OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency)

* Telecommunications: Title 47, Part 42

* Pharmaceutical: FDA--Title 21, Part 11

* Healthcare: HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)

* Defense: DOD--5015.2 standard

* Brokerage firms: SEC--Rule 17a-3 and 17a-4

* General business oversight: Sarbanes-Oxley Act (The government's response to the Enron debacle, it contains provisions for record retention and audits. It strongly discourages anyone from altering, destroying, hiding or falsifying records in response to a federal investigation or bankruptcy proceeding. Penalties include whopping fines and/or imprisonment of up to 20 years.)