Are you playing Russian roulette with your e-mail documents?
Many companies overlook the significance of e-mail as an important form of documentation.
If you are one of those, you risk learning the value of structured e-mail archiving the hard way. But how do you deal with this rapidly growing challenge?
Lars Thomsen from the Danish Competence Centre for IT Security has some good advice for you.
Can you imagine a sales director who has no idea where the papers relating to a gilt-edged customer contract are? Or a management secretary who just goes blank when some asks where the letter containing the decision in an important case is? Of course not – it’s unthinkable.
But this is sometimes what happens when it comes to important documentation contained in e-mails. Many companies often find it difficult to retrieve important e-mails as they overlook the importance of archiving them securely. And this is in spite of the fact that e-mails are increasingly replacing both the telephone and letters as the medium of company agreements, correspondence and statements etc.
The advice to companies who want to make sure they are fully protected is to take a close look at how they store, and for that matter delete, their e-mails. And this comes from someone who knows what he’s talking about – specialist consultant Lars Thomsen from the Danish Competence Centre for IT Security.
A clear e-mail archiving policy is a must
“A company that does not have an overview of which e-mails are sent, by whom, to which recipients and when, basically does not know what it has committed itself to or what agreements it has entered into. This is a potential danger for every company, big or small, private or public,” explains Lars.
Lars stresses that companies should have a clear policy for e-mail archiving and that file servers and ordinary back-up processes are rarely enough. In his opinion, “structured document management is needed in order to avoid a situation where an important e-mail has disappeared forever, resulting in monetary costs, lost court cases, loss of image and lost customers, etc.”
Compliance is not just a legal issue
According to Lars, one of today’s buzz words, compliance, is not just about adhering to legal requirements and IT standards. It’s also about following good business practice. “It’s so easy to send an e-mail. You just push a button. Many managers just assume it will be stored somewhere or other, and of course it is. The question though is where. Now let’s say there’s a high turnover of staff. At sometime or other someone is going to have to sift through terabytes of e-mails to find e-mail information sent out by former members of staff. This ties up enormous resources.
The build-up of information is another problem that results from the huge increase in the use of e-mails. This build-up is due to the fact that many employees copy their colleagues in on e-mails that they send and also because lots of them save e-mails both on an e-mail server and on their own drive.”
Make IT more energy efficient
“This requires enormous server resources, which in turn require enormous electricity resources, and this is not consistent with the idea of green IT, which is a hot topic,” says Lars, who also stresses the importance of businesses reviewing not just how they store e-mails, but also how they delete them.
“Of course, deletion only applies to e-mails that are not covered by legislation or other guidelines. So often it is a legal decision which in practice makes the company much better off than if things were left to chance. If it can be shown that an e-mail has been deleted because a company has decided to implement a deletion policy, this is evidence that it has its house in order. It shows that the e-mail has not just been deleted without justification and is ultimately proof of good business practice, which can never be criticised.”
Consider a system that could reduce the number of e-mails
If companies want to avoid the potentially dangerous loss of important information, they must recognise e-mail management in the management plan and give it the same importance as archiving contracts, for example. In other words, a company must examine how it can make archiving both simple and secure.
“Companies should consider a system that makes it possible to archive a single copy of every e-mail. This makes it easy to save and retrieve e-mails and can also dramatically reduce the company’s need for mail server capacity,” Lars concludes.
