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The challenge

Over the past 10 years, email has grown rapidly from being a minority messaging service, to being a critical business tool at the heart of all organisation's. However, the majority of organisation's do not really have the appropriate processes and procedures in place to properly manage email communications in a manner befitting their critical role in the modern organisation - as the main communications tool used for most employees to perform their work; as an e-commerce platform; as a medium for the transfer of legal documentation.

The absence of a centralised, tamper-evident, email repository is exposing many organisation's to a wide variety of serious business issues which are becoming increasingly common as email use increases and legislation and regulation expands to cover email communications:

• Legal and regulatory issues such as complying with regulatory authorities' requirements for document retention periods, or being able to provide emails in court with any evidential weight.

• Internal company issues such as managing misuse of email by employees, tracing information leaks, HR investigations of harassment and other HR issues.
  
• IT management issues ranging from disaster recovery of corrupted/lost mail to efficient data retrieval from increasingly huge mail repositories.

Research has shown that there are more than 10,000 laws and regulations (and the number is rising) across the world covering all aspects of Compliance, and this clearly impacts an entire organisation, crossing boundaries between the IT and the business divisions, including stakeholders typically not involved in decision-making such as legal departments or Chief Compliance Officers. (ESG, 2004)

Since January 2005 US subsidiaries operating internationally are bound by Sarbanes-Oxley, the EU have announced its intention to adopt SOX like legislation and the UK have introduced the Freedom of Information Act.

Regulatory pressures are increasing across all industries, including: Banking and Brokerage, Pharmaceutical, Insurance, Telecommunications, Energy/Utilities, and Government. There is a tremendous volume of pending legislation targeted at records management and “Best Practices” are pushing other non-regulated industries.

There are already cases publicised where auditors have been unable to sign-off publicly quoted company accounts pending further investigations, this action alone seriously and immediately impacts the stock price and value of the businesses concerned over matters that could have been addressed by adherence to “good practices in record keeping”.

Please use our email archiving and compliance resources section to the right of this page for further detail within specific areas of email archiving compliance.

Should you wish to discuss your requirement or would like to have a few answers to questions, please call us immediatley or simply email us.

We are keen to discuss your archiving future intentions and would like to introduce you to our simple methods of saving your storage costs whilst complying with the myriad of conflicting regulations.

If you would like to contact a member of our consultancy team today please either telephone or email;

Tel: +44 (0) 1622 618 752
Email: consultancy@bii-compliance.com