Next-generation Email Compliance and Legal Discovery Software

Email archiving has become an increasingly complicated task companies which need to complete in order to comply with compliance laws, while internal data archiving may be considered something exclusive of banks and financial institutions, laws have been enacted to regulate several other industries.

The following list briefly shows the industries and laws which are to be kept:

Healthcare: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 1996, which involves patient health data encryption during transmission throughout a network.

Hedge Funds: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 2006 regulations on private investment pools, this involves archiving and securing all electronic communication.

Pharmaceutical: 21 CFR Part 11 by the FDA (1997) which involves rules for the use of electronic signatures and records.

Accounting: The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, 2002. This law sets strict regulations about the retention and maintenance of records.

Banking: The Gramm-Leach Bliley Act, 1999. This law was enacted to protect customer’s information while in transit or in storage by strict encryption measures.

Securities: SEC 17a-4 and NASD 3010. Both regulations set strict standards on electronic communications which involves emails.

As stated above, businesses operating within these industries are expected to comply with information archival, encryption and maintenance regulations. The problems with these laws is that they require strict classification of internal data which can’t be accomplished using traditional email applications such as Microsoft Outlook or any other mail client.

The fact that a company can gather hundreds of thousands and even millions of emails and electronic communications is overwhelming, not to mention that if the company in question is inspected, owners and managers have to sort and classify all of these records within a short period of time since inspectors won’t wait weeks or months to have all this information sorted out.

Managing and classifying this information is one requirement which is hard to accomplish but these laws also require heavy encryption to make sure data won’t be leaked or modified from the network and fall into the wrong hands. As you can see there are many guidelines which need to be kept so it is imperative to use software tools which can be managed by one person quickly and efficiently, these law compliance tools should provide features such as:

* Accurate Search platform

* Find and collect all electronic communication within the network with a single operation

* Classification of all incoming and outgoing emails through automatic global policies

* Extremely Strong Internal Controls for Compliance

* Verified and unalterable logs

* Full auditing of all searches, email reviewed, and logons

* Powerful data collection tools

* Data loss protection

As you can see all of these tasks are so complex and time intensive that even if assigned to an entire division of a company, it couldn’t be accomplish quickly, securely and accurately; that is why special electronic communication management software is required. It is extremely important to keep in mind that the use of this technology is not a luxury but the LAW. Using these tools can help you keep your business going without worrying about communication compliance laws.

Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One

Email management could be a company’s saving grace in today’s world of litigation and information overload. Email is now one of the most used communication systems around, over which important business decisions are often made, therefore an adequate email management system is vital to any business.

Managing one’s emails effectively could result in a much more productive work environment in terms of organization and timeliness, as well as helping with audit purposes. Furthermore, recent legislation has made it mandatory that all businesses and organizations need to be able to produce any documentation requested by the courts if legal issues arise.

Email Archiving as part of email management

Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. Administrators can maintain an archive of all the company’s email correspondence which will be easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduce the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and are not secure backups of email data.

Moreover, in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, email archiving is a must, whilst being able to access archived emails and corporate data in a matter of seconds can help realize a return on investment and therefore boost the company’s productivity.

Legislation and Regulations

Apart from the legal benefits that an email management policy presents, it is also important when dealing with inter-company issues such as harassment or dismissal charges, where critical information may have been recorded via email.

If an employee used his work email account for illicit purposes, verifying such a fact could prove to be a difficult task without an adequate email archiving system.

Email management from a legal perspective requires organizations to keep records of email documentation for a minimum period of up to five years. Such legislation includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which affects all industries and imposes severe penalties on anyone who deliberately alters or deletes documents with the intent to defraud third parties.

Even though it is a US law, SOX act is also applicable to European companies with US listings as well as to companies that do business with the US. There are other legislations that also require companies and organizations to archive emails, as well as government bodies that comply with the regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, National Archive Records Administration (NARA) and other legislative entities.

Storage & Knowledge Issues with Email Management

Managing one’s emails is not only a legal and compliance issue but also delves into the fields of storage and knowledge management. There has been a dramatic increase in storage size due to the increase in email usage over the years as well as the upsurge in attachments sent with original emails.

This increase has affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. An efficient email archiving solution stores emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings and centralizes your email records.

Furthermore, emails are automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do so without having bulky PST files stored locally.

Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for an email management policy a critical issue for any company. Managing emails through archiving allows organizations to have control over employees’ email accounts whilst ensuring regulatory and corporate compliance.

The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

Email has become the standard method of correspondence used by businesses sending important and sometimes confidential messages. Such sensitive information needs to be archived for possible future use in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, specific regulations as well as the company’s email compliance policies.

Email correspondence is used for both internal and external affairs therefore it is important that a copy of all emails is archived for possible future needs relating to legal, compliance and human resource issues. A company must also be in a position to respond to eDiscovery requests at short notice.

Why a company needs email archiving

Existing regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the FRCP treat emails as being equal to paper-based documents in terms of valid and legal documentation presented in a court of law and are therefore admissible during an eDiscovery request.

eDiscovery is the process of locating, securing and using documentation from a company’s archives in a legal setting, so a company must have the ability to procure the necessary documents with the confirmation that these have not been tampered with. Failure to abide by procedures could result in court fines and other financial burdens, as well as a failing reputation.

How email archiving should be implemented

For security, maintenance and resource reasons, email archives should not be archived on the mail server but should have their own localized server that is specific to the task.

Having your emails archived on a separate database ensures more protection for the archives should the server crash, as well as lightening the load on the server. When archiving is another process that the email server is meant to handle, its resources are being stretched to capacity risking poor performance in both tasks. A dedicated email server and a dedicated archiving server render the upkeep of both machines a simpler and cleaner process.

Moreover, separate backups of both servers ensure a safer environment, as by having the archived emails on a separate server, should the email server crash all is not lost since the archived emails would be accessible and easily recoverable meaning that work can be resumed from a certain point.

Email archiving compliance

In industries and countries where regulations require organizations to monitor user activity and keep audit trails, a system that records, logs and retains a database of user activity, or other secure methods such as encryption will ensure that emails have not been tampered with as this would render them inadmissible in a court of law. An auditing facility is also important for compliance purposes.

Log files and counts must prove that all emails (including their attachments) are being captured and can be searched for, found and viewed in their original format. Advising users that their emails are being recorded and archived will act as a deterrent to any abuse of the system.

Email archiving is becoming a standard practice in today’s businesses as the implementation of a successful email compliance policy could save a company a lot of time, money and resources, and provide guarantees that it is in a position to respond to eDiscovery processes and fulfil the requirements of compliance regulation which the company must adhere to.

What You MUST KNOW About Email Compliance

www.Jathon.com Email Compliance Odds are very high that your organization or firm is subject to some regulation on how to retain records. Some industries face stricter rules than others ie. health care organizations are governed by different rules than the financial sector as they need to adhere to HIPAA guidelines. Regulations are something that just about any organization has to deal with. However, the real challenge is to know which guidelines to adhere to and to keep up to date as they are constantly changing. Common regulations that organizations adhere to include: * The Freedom of Information Act * FDA 21 CFR Part 11 * HIPAA * SEC 17a (3, 4) * NASD Rule 3110 & NYSE Rule 440 * IDA 29.7 (Canada) * Investment Advisors Act * Sarbanes-Oxley * PIPEDA (Canada) * Gramm-Leach-Bliley * FRCP *this is not a complete list of compliance regulation for the above specified industries. Compliance – How It Works Organizations form all industries or services have the daunting task of monitoring electronic messages to ensure the strict adherence to regulatory or corporate policies. Jatheon’s Plug n Comply™ appliances offer the ability to set policies that messages are compared to in real-time. Messages received by the archive are compared to the user created polices and any messages that violate the established policy will have a pre-determined action triggered. This action may include notifying the offender directly; notify the offender’s manager, or notifying the organizations Compliance Officer. The Compliance Officer can review the statistics maintained by the appliance; detailed statistical information is maintained on a daily basis. Compliance Officers can review the detailed violation statistics by rule.

eMail Compliance

Mike Kieffer of Intradyn, Inc. talks about email archiving and compliance.

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