Navigation * Home / Solutions / Email Archiving & Compliance / Archiving & IT issues

Email Compliance & Archiving IT issues

The IT department is usually one of the first areas of an organisation to run up against email retention issues and put in place some kind of a technical solution. Typical IT challenges related to email retention are:

• Archiving mail on mail servers to prevent such a large volume of mail building up that performance is impaired, and other storage optimisation issues

• Disaster recovery, such as recovering files from backup in the event of a mail server issue, corrupt mailbox, etc

• Retrieving specific mail files, for example when someone takes over the responsibilities of an employee who has left the company and access is required to their email for handover purposes

• Dealing with storage overheads inherent in PST files, and managing user quotas in Exchange

It should be noted that while IT departments are often prompt to put in place some kind of email archiving technology that deals with their own most pressing concerns to keep the email system manageable, these backups are usually not particularly appropriate for many of the email retention needs of the wider business concerning regulatory compliance, corporate governance and forensic inquiry of email abuse.

For example:

• A repository which enables deletion of mails is not tamper-evident, and therefore is lacking as a compliance tool or source of court evidence

• Many back-ups do not form a complete record since mails deleted before period back-ups occur are missed

• Search and retrieval processes are rarely set up to realistically handle queries like "find out if an email has ever been sent about subject x", though this kind of request is often made when investigating serious abuse allegations such as fraud

These more complex requirements may demand a formal retention tool with more advanced features above and beyond pure archiving and bulk retrieval.

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