Simple Steps To Compliance: Streamline Emails To Gain A Competitive Edge

In just a few decades, the way people communicate with each other in both personal and business settings has changed dramatically. In the virtual and paperless world, a lot of information can be transferred from one place to another in the world in seconds.

In just a few decades, the way people communicate with each other in both personal and business settings has changed dramatically. In the virtual and paperless world, a lot of information can be transferred from one place to another in the world in seconds. As companies adopt and benefit from information technology, they also struggle to determine appropriate usage parameters.

This is being fueled by regulatory bodies and regulators in various industries, who have implemented stricter requirements for the storage and handling of information data in response to land litigation in recent years. Organizations of all sizes know that archiving corporate email is not a luxury but a necessity in today's legal environment. However, prospects that seem positive should also be viewed as the main tool for creating a strategic advantage for the company. Also, archiving emails is not scary. The impressive growth of this market provides flexible and affordable storage options for companies of all sizes. Explosive market According to statistics, in 2011, the pharmaceutical drug market grew nearly 10 times from US$796 million in 2006 to nearly $6.1 billion.

The independent market research company is the Radicati Group. North America and Europe are the largest markets, accounting for 60% and 32% of global sales, respectively. What drives this demand? The three conditions are as follows: The use of email and instant messaging (IM) is increasing rapidly worldwide. The average business email user sends and receives 133 messages per day, a quarter of which are attachments. Enterprise IM adoption is heating up again. As demand grows, major platforms, including IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft LCS/OCS, are making IM a key component of their unified communications strategy. Business email users have increasing storage needs. Emails are growing in size rapidly as more forms and content files are sent as email attachments. In 2006, the average business email user sent and received approximately 16.4 MB of data per day. In 2010, this number exceeded 21.4 MB.

Compliance requirements. The growing legal environment surrounding the use and storage of email and other messaging data affects companies in almost every industry. Federal regulations require companies to submit electronic evidence. Companies that fail to store, locate, and share emails risk losing credibility in court. Analyst firm AMR Research estimates that illegal spending in North America will exceed $80 billion in 2010, which could be considered a hidden tax on profits. Challenges Large and small companies face a number of common challenges in their information systems, including: The need for compliance. Government and corporate laws are very specific in their requirements.

In addition to industry requirements, some companies implement their own message retention policies. Some don't. A study from the American Management Association and the Electronic Policy Institute found that 66 percent of companies do not have a policy for retaining, deleting, and managing email. All users need to quickly access and manage company information. The volume of electronic messages caused users problems, and email quickly turned into a product headache for many companies. In fact, a study from Osterman Research found that 46% of email users spend two hours a day doing something in their email inbox.

There is a need to store more data without affecting the performance of the system. As the size of the average user's email box continues to grow, organizations are working hard to recover from broken servers and administrative mailboxes (often with useful information deleted). to meet the required quotas. Why are electronic messages archived? In short, email archiving is a system that automatically removes emails, attachments, and email-related information from email servers. We then automatically store and mark this information in a read-only format for a specified period of time based on company or industry retention policies. Users can still access email and IM content stored in archives without placing a load on the email server.

Archiving allows companies to define policies, search for information, and maintain an audit trail of who accessed the information and when. A company creates email reports and IM communications for four main reasons. Obedience. Organizations in nearly every industry—from financial services to health care, government, and more—are subject to certain regulations regarding the storage and handling of electronic data. The Federal Rules of Civil Rights, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the USA Patriot Act, HIPAA, SEC rules, federal laws, and company policies are all part of this dynamic legal environment. Email storage capacity and management. Companies often limit the size of each user's mailbox to optimize email server performance.

This forces users to spend time cleaning their refrigerators, reducing their productivity. However, sending large mailboxes can have a negative impact on the efficiency of your email server. Electronic detection. Backing up company computer data is different from archiving. One of the main differences is that, following most of the rules, e-mails, attachments, and instant messages must be kept in their original format, and no one can change their content or delete them all. Unlike backups, which are performed at the end of each day and are designed to recover the email server after a crash, reports are created on the front end before messages reach the end user's computer and stored on non-volatile media. - Writing format. Reports are also searchable, which greatly simplifies the electronic search process. For example, if Company X sues Company Y, lawyers will review all emails related to the case. Without an archive of emails, it would have taken a team of lawyers and IT experts months to find them. In comparison, searching for keywords through email reports can take a few minutes. Corporate knowledge. About 75% of a company's intellectual property is in its information systems. Additionally, users often refer to old emails when composing new ones. The archive allows companies to access a large repository of corporate knowledge through an easy-to-use, searchable interface.

Advantages of Internal Archiving To organize an email archive, companies have two main options: With internal email archiving, companies can purchase and manage their own solutions. With an outsourcing solution, the company's email is stored and managed off-site by a third-party vendor. The email archiving market is flooded with archiving vendors and solutions. Choosing an archiving solution can be overwhelming, especially for companies that don't have an email policy but are pressured by industry regulations and the threat of lawsuits.

That said, there are several compelling reasons to build an in-house storage solution: Simplicity. Depending on the solution chosen, the internal storage device does not take up more space than a normal router and can be completed in a few hours. Even in an IT department with just one team, it's easy to manage tools and have little or no IT experience. The initial setup is done by the hardware vendor or installation partner. Security. Given the confidential nature of many email communications and file attachments, company owners are often reluctant to allow third parties to store their content outside the office, especially Email archiving is currently an unregulated industry. Policymakers have similar concerns, including the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), which said in its membership bulletin that "outsourcing and dealing with third parties does not help members of their primary responsibility... the responsibility of the users. true. When using an external solution, the performance of the server may decrease during periods of high volume because the same messages carry bandwidth, whether they are sent, received, or stored. Instead, internal storage captures a copy of all incoming and outgoing messages after or before attachment to the outside world, without affecting the bandwidth or performance of the company's servers. Cost-effectiveness.

For small companies, the application of outsourcing solutions is a little more expensive. But over time, cost analysis will benefit from in-house solutions. For example, a 100-person company might pay $10,000 for in-house bookkeeping equipment. The company maintains the reporting process, so there is no charge. One company might pay $3,500 per month for an off-site solution (100 seats x $35 per seat—the mid-range price for off-site storage today), and this monthly fee is recurring when choosing the company to keep his email. Internal Archiving in a Practical Application Internal archiving tools can be set up in a matter of hours and integrated into existing corporate email interfaces. Here's how an encryption tool and corporate email solution work: 1. Once incoming messages and emails pass through the corporate firewall and spam filters, they are routed to the router. 2. If the email system is running internally (for example, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, or another network system), the archiving tool captures each message and its attachments (a process called "logging"). 3. If the email platform is hosted by a third-party provider or a smaller, proprietary email system, the archiving tool captures a copy of all message traffic as it passes through the exchange or router (a process called "sniffing"). 4. Users can access their email files and perform basic or advanced searches through their email programs. Corporate compliance officers (mostly IT staff at small companies) need minimal IT training to resolve messaging rules. Vehicles are tracked and impounded. These rules may be determined by the compliance requirements governing the company's business, the company's email policies, or a combination of the two.

It can be changed at any time via the drop-down menu. Challenging Storage Inertia The threat of non-compliance or system crashes due to limited storage capacity is driving many companies to retain email. However, savvy companies also know that email is a source of organizational intelligence that can be mined to better understand the company, its customers, and opportunities for growth and improvement. Even if you don't have a policy for email management and retention, companies should start archiving now. Good internal documents can easily be changed as company policies evolve. The worst thing you can do is do nothing. With a few simple steps, companies can not only ensure future success but also gain significant strategic benefits.

Page: Company Email/IM Policy Recommendations Your company is one of many that has not yet taken steps to develop an email and IM usage and retention policy. The following tips will guide you in achieving this goal:

* This should not be considered an IT project. Your company's policies regarding the use and storage of email and instant messaging should be developed with input from the entire organization. Involve IT, legal, HR, compliance, customer relations, and operations in strategic planning, ensuring global divisions also have a voice.

* Create two policies: one for email and IM retention, and one for company email and IM use. These policies will be independent, but most importantly, they will be developed at the same time. Both should be reviewed and updated annually.

* Be sure to communicate your policies to all employees, not only via email but also through face-to-face training and discussions at office meetings. Be specific and specific. It is important that everyone in the company understands the correct and appropriate uses of email and instant messaging and that violating the usage guidelines is a punishable offense.

Employees should also be aware that copies of everything they send will be kept. This knowledge alone reduces the risk of inappropriate messages. * Do not delay archiving without a retention policy. Basically, policies come first and define archive setting parameters. But for many companies, the policy takes several months to develop and implement, and most companies do not want to take the risk of losing it through failure. that meets or costs the e-discovery process. Local storage solutions can be easily adapted when the policy is made.

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