In a lawsuit-happy world, businesses of all kinds and sizes must maintain accurate and complete records of their electronic correspondence. Legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States, as well as a significant body of other laws around the world, mandate retention of electronic communications for periods as long as seven years. For this reason liability over privacy violations is a huge concern in recent times. An organization's mail and other electronic communications data can't simply be wiped away and deleted, because multiple copies almost always exist on both the sending and receiving ends, and correspondence often forwarded multiple times among several parties as well. Furthermore, most electronic communications reside simultaneously within the hard drives of a multitude of personal computers, laptops and workstations.
In the almost inevitable event of a lawsuit, electronic discovery or ' e-Discovery ' demands will be made by subpoena for all records relating to an often broadly-defined set of possible violations. An organization must then promptly produce these email discovery documents for these legal fishing expeditions, or risk serious consequences and penalties.
Email archiving is term which refers to the indexing and storage of email messages and attachments using specially designed software systems. Archived material often includes other communications data such as SMS and chat messaging, calendars, contacts, notes and their associated metadata. The main function of email archiving software is to capture and store all email traffic flowing in and out an organization's email servers, so it can be quickly searched and accessed later. This saves time and money by eliminating the need for inefficient searches through standard backup media or even paper records. Several email archiving applications exist in the form of software packages, to support most email messaging systems. This email archiving software can either installed locally, or outsourced to an external hosting service.
Somewhat akin to the 'black box' data recorders on aircraft, email archiving software can create and maintain tamper-evident repositories of all electronic correspondence moving to and from an organization, archiving the necessary data for operational data retention requirements, internal policy enforcement, privacy issues, regulatory compliance, electronic discovery, and storage management needs. Many email archiving solutions exists which can integrate seamlessly and transparently into existing systems, improving mail system performance, lowering storage costs, and providing robust search capabilities. Companies often find that an added side benefit of using these email archiving solutions is a heightened ability to access their records not only to meet the electronic discovery demands of litigators and regulatory agencies, but also for the company's own use.
Never before in all of human history has so much information been available to be retrieved by parties both benevolent and nefarious - via only a few strokes on a keyboard. Email archiving software can help solve some of the biggest problems facing information managers: how to quickly find information, and back up communications data in a centralized archive. A broad range of compliance archiving software choices can import mail from many different email systems and software, and provide lightning-fast search, helping organizations address the many complicated and thorny data-related issues of the Internet age.
Find out more about email archiving software and compliance archiving systems at http://compliancearchiving.com
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