Email Archiving
There
are a number of reasons why organizations install an email archiving
system:
- To provide a means whereby email users can have easy access to many
years worth of email without overloading the email server system.
- To offload data from the your email server and thereby improve
performance and storage efficiency.
- To meet statutory and regulatory compliance legislation by enabling compliance and legal representatives to retrieve users email simply and in compliance with European privacy legislation.
With the increasing reliance on email as part of everyday business processes, it simply makes sense that organisations should be able to make most efficient use of their server resources, optimise use of storage, and gain control of both intellectual property that is increasingly transmitted via email, as well as vital information that they may need to rely on in a court of law at a later date.
Email archiving systems integrate with your email system either using a software agent or by using journalling to capture messages as they pass through the system. Having captured the information, emails and associated attachments are preserved, compressed and indexed so that they can be easily retrieved at a late date from "offline" storage either by an employee or by company compliance / legal staff in the event that information that has been sent or received via email needs to be retrieved to resolve a contractual dispute. The search facilities provided as part of the email archiving system dramatically reduce the cost of retrieving information stored in email and can significantly help organisations to comply with court orders for disclosure of information.
Clearview Systems is an authorised partner for the Cryoserver email archiving system. Cryoserver is a forensic email archiving system that is specifically targeted at organisations for whom compliance is a high priority. Email from the mail server is copied to Cryoserver using journaling which is straightforward to configure. The strength of Cryoserver however lies in the powerful search capabilities that it provides via a web interface. Users can search both within emails and attachments for words, phrases and even misspellings.
Cryoserver also includes some strong compliance features. In the event of an investigation, if a search of a user's email is required to retrieve evidence, a dialogue box needs to be completed to explain why the search is being conducted. Notification of who is searching staff emails and the reason for doing so is then emailed to organisational data guardians. This allows organisations to retrieve emails as part of an investigation and still stay on the right side of European privacy legislation.
The alternative to email archiving is continued reliance on a combination of backup tapes and PST files stored on the workstation. This is extremely inefficient and makes investigation in the event of a subject access request or court order extremely costly. Now that email is intimately woven into our daily business processes, such information needs to be found in minutes, not days or weeks.