Developing and managing e-mail archiving policies

09.04.2010

Many e-mail archiving solutions are focused on reducing storage costs, but storage is getting cheaper, so the savings vendors show today may not be relevant a year from now, he said. Storage costs drop about 50 per cent a year, whereas litigation costs are going up, said Matus.

Inboxer, an e-mail archiving solution for the mid-sized enterprise market, pre-indexes messages so when a search is performed, the retrieval is quick because the messages are already identified, he said. The solution has identified 80 items that are most frequently searched by users, which include senders and recipients as well as Canadian SINs and provincial drivers licenses, he said.

Organizations need to set the policies of what needs to be kept and what processes need to be followed, and then IT needs to prove that the process has been followed or the documents have been kept in an immutable way, said Patrick Eitenbichler, director of worldwide product marketing, information management, software at .

It's important to have policies in place to capture relevant information, but it may not be necessary to capture all documents from all employees, he said. "If a document was rightfully deleted based on the policy they have set, they are actually much better off from a compliance perspective ... because it is clear they set a policy and they made the best effort to capture the relevant information," he said.