Data Protection Laws Make Email Archiving Vital For UK Businesses

Online, June 10, 2010 (Newswire.com) - The area of the business that always carries the highest risk - particularly with regard to business continuity and increasingly in today's regulatory environment in the event of litigation - is IT. However, it is an area of the business where the right infrastructure and policies can also have a huge impact on the efficiency of the entire organisation and can make a business continuity event or the need to provide access to emails as part of a lawsuit, for example, into a non-event. An organisation's investment into providing effective IT systems that support employees in their everyday jobs and which protect the organisation from potential problems is often key to its success.

As a result, businesses need to do all they can to ensure that they both have the edge over their competition and they are prepared for every eventuality. Yes, this means getting their products and services right but it also means running a tight ship and putting in procedures and systems to protect the business against the many possible problems that might affect it. Organisations need to have the foresight to invest in key infrastructure and to put the right policies in place to deliver both greater operational efficiencies and also to prevent costly mistakes from happening in the future - something that often doesn't happen until a business has experienced the effects of a mistake or an outage of its core systems.

One of the most used and most vital systems within any organisation, and often also the most fragmented and least optimised or protected, is its email system, which transports huge volumes of critical and often highly sensitive business data and information on a daily basis, both inside and outside of the organisation. One of the major problems with email relates to performance; organisations typically have large email message stores which are difficult and time consuming to back up and users constantly exceed email storage quotas and end up deleting important business information in order to free up space in their mailbox. This is just one way that data is lost on email since, once deleted, many companies are unable to respond either to employees' or external requests to retrieve deleted or lost emails. Worse, they may be at risk of major financial impact in the event of a system crash.

If you consider that non-compliance with UK data protection laws carries substantial penalties and that there are multiple legal clauses regulating records management, including a company's ability to discover and retrieve stored information, it is even more surprising that so few businesses are equipped to handle email archiving and back up in a coherent and strategic way.

Data loss carries even greater weight in recent years in the wake of some fairly high profile cases where organisations have fallen foul of the UK's data protection laws. All organisations that regularly exchange contractual or sensitive documentation could be asked to produce emails during Subject Access Requests and are required to maintain records and data over a number of years in case of future litigation. Yet, it is fair to say that corporate UK continues to grapple with legislation governing the management of electronic information - including storage, backup, archiving, retention and retrieval - and the need to balance compliance alongside cost, service and productivity.

Thanks to the legal requirements to store information electronically to support discovery and disclosure requests, storage is an ever-growing issue for IT infrastructure managers. Clearly storing this information 'in the cloud' is the only practical future route to avoid the huge, complex internal storage and retrieval systems that companies would need in order to retain business information for the requisite number of years to ensure legal compliance.

In the light of the above and given the importance of email as a carrier of critical business information, there is a surprising lack of clarity amongst businesses surrounding the issues of email archiving and back up. With a typical email user sending around 41 emails a day (and bear in mind that this is an average so a busy executive may send many more, often containing highly sensitive, valuable company information), all organisations are at risk from losing vital data - whether deleted by an employee, lost during a system outage or through some other means.

Using a system like Evaden's Unified Mail Communication service allows companies to make provision for local, national and international email to be routed via the closest entry point, archived centrally and Smart Indexed for instant search and retrieval. Because this is done 'in the cloud', ultimately this frees up space on the client email servers, both increasing bandwidth efficiency and reducing storage costs.

In addition, Cloud or Software-as-a-service (SaaS) archiving and discovery solutions provide considerable benefits over on-premise solutions with regard to ease of installation and ongoing maintenance - with much of the burden taken on by the service provider - as well as low installation costs (no licences, software, training or hardware costs) and demonstrably low Total Cost of Ownership.

Where compliance is concerned, a solution like Evaden preserves and stores all emails for the client in a tamper-proof encrypted format in a series of geo-synchronous secure data vaults. Each item contains a full-trace dataset of forensic information, including proof of delivery to facilitate non-repudiation, and Evaden's solution ensures a company's compliance with a long list of government guidelines and internationally published codes of good practice, these include: BSI 7799; BSI PD00008, PD0010, PD5000; UK Data Protection Act; RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000); UK Employment Law; and SEC 17a, and ensure maximum legal admissibility and evidential weight, as well as adherence to company email usage policy.