Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4904
EMAIL ARCHIVING OFFERS PROPER STORAGE OF EMAIL current customer contract. Should an employee leave or be terminated, you would still have that information. Despite the current Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and a con- tinually growing list of data reten- tion regulations, some organizations are unsure of what they should and should not be deleting. In many cases, they believe that email backup and email archiving are one in the same. "There is a lot of misinforma- tion about the differences between archiving and backup," says Aseem Asthana, product manager for Barracuda Message Archiver. "Many organizations are under the false im- pression that regular backup of their email server meets regulatory com- pliance and litigation management needs. The reality is that there are major differences between backup and archiving." Asthana explains that a backup sys- tem's primary task is to save all infor- mation such that it can be restored when a disaster occurs, (either a major natural disaster, or a minor error created by a user). A backup system is not designed, however, to keep information available in near real-time or to save all emails. Emails that are deleted before a backup is scheduled are not saved, as in the case of Boston's City Hall. The only way to get deleted items included in the backup would be to require the email server to keep deleted emails for an extra period of time to allow the backup system to catch up. "This introduces two independent systems," observes Asthana, "the email server and the backup sys- tem—to perform one task, email archiving." Many organizations, he says, also incorrectly believe that email archiving is either too complex or too expensive. "None of those assumptions are correct. In today's business environment, where access to information can be a differentia- tor, there is no reason for any orga- nization not to take advantage of email archiving." T he importance of archiving emails can be seen in various national headlines—email de- letion at Boston's City Hall against Massachusetts public records law comes to mind. Among many com- mon sense reasons to archive emails are the myriad rules and regulations (depending on the industry) that govern its retention and recovery. Email also creates a historical record of every role in an organization. You probably don't care to know what somebody had for lunch, but you may want the back-story on a BY MELISA LaBANCZ-BLEASDALE 16 MESSAGING NEWS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009