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The rapid evolution of information technology is forcing companies to change the way they operate at a rate of speed never seen before. And as is common with uncharted territories, there are going to be unprecedented territorial disputes along the way.
Think back to the mid 90’s, when email was more of a novelty. Back then, business communications were primarily done through phone, fax, and post. And what few emails were sent, were usually simple text messages.
Boy, how times have changed in such a short period of time. Today, email has become the primary means for organizations to relay information.
Each of us sends and receives dozens of emails on a daily basis. And with the evolution of workplace collaboration (often involving large scanned documents and multimedia files) and increased bandwidth speeds, the size and frequency of these messages is growing at an exponential rate.
Of course, with this technology also comes an increased responsibility to monitor and control the flow of information throughout your company.
From the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), lawmakers are driving new legislation and policies to address problems that would’ve been inconceivable even 2 years ago.
New regulations are emerging that require increased retention and disclosure of corporate communications. And failure to comply could result in serious consequences for your organization.
Imagine the possibility that someday, a judge might request several specific emails that your employees had sent a few years ago. Without a proper methodology in place, your legal team will have to go through the costly process of manually sorting out important business records from tens of thousands of transitory messages.
If you are unprepared or unable to produce these emails and their associated attachments in a timely and accurate fashion, the judge may decide impose heavy penalties and fines on your company.
That’s why it’s so urgent that you immediately take the steps to create a comprehensive email archiving policy that will facilitate the ediscovery process later on.
This might sound complicated on paper, but there are lots of great email archiving applications available right now that greatly simplify the process of storing, sorting and classifying archival email in order to simplify the search process later on.
Best of all, some of these solutions are provided using a SaaS (Software as a Service) model that eliminates the up-front capital investment that is usually associated with enterprise software initiatives of this kind.
Instead of paying for support, equipment, staffing, upgrades and licensing, you simply rent the archiving service using a pay-as-you-go model.
Now more than ever, it’s important to lay the foundations that will protect you from future litigation. Implementing email archiving today will help eliminate logistical headaches down the road.
Prepare yourself for future trends in litigation and start working on your own internal email archiving policy.
About the author:
Storagepipe Solutions provides email archiving and online backup technology that helps companies protect themselves in the event of possible future litigation or other data disasters.
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