Email and Communications Archiving: Best Practices 101

admin — Fri, 14 May 2021 23:46:07 +0000

Email and Communications Archiving: Best Practices 101 admin Fri, 05/14/2021 - 18:46 Archive Noah Webster

Co-Author: Madison Arcemont

The word archiving conjures up images of an infinitely large room of books or computers that have been storing information forever. This image is dated and, in the age of digital transformation, it is critical to think about simplifying the process of archiving electronic data. There is a fear associated with archiving that your data will be held forever, creating budget and resource pressure. But, with the right processes and tools, you maintain control over your data and retention policies while creating a structure that satisfies internal business processes and external legal requirements.

What data are you required to keep?

There are several reasons to maintain your company’s data: you may be required to keep those documents and communications by law, or it may be beneficial to reference in your regular course of business. Depending on whether you need to reference data for compliance, anticipated or ongoing litigation, investigation, or operational needs, you will need to maintain different kinds of data. When building your retention policies, you should start by running an audit to determine what data you create and how long it needs to be maintained.

Compliance

Several laws and regulations require companies to retain certain document types. For example, most companies will be covered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax audit procedures, employment laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA), the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA), and mandates by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

There are also industry-specific requirements. Some of these laws include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for organizations handling medical information, the Bank Secrecy Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (among many others) for banking institutions, and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to serve customers in the European Union.

In general, your company is required to retain corporate records like: accounting records, employee benefit plan records, insurance records, personnel records, and tax records. Click here for a more detailed list of the documents that fit in each of those categories(compiled by a state CPA Society).

In addition to corporate records, the SEC requires certain companies, like broker-dealers, to retain business-related communications (including work-related social media, like Slack, GroupMe, and WhatsApp). These requirements vary based on your individual industry and company, so consult with your HR, legal, tax, and finance advisors to ensure you are retaining records for the proper length of time.

Operational needs

Beyond legal compliance, data retention can support your business operations. For example, it may be beneficial for your company to maintain sales and product development reports to improve products going forward. Any documents that your teams refer to regularly should also be maintained, which is dependent on your company's needs.

Agreements

Customer or partner agreements should be maintained for at least the duration of the contractual period and a reasonable time afterwards. Your retention practices should align with what your agreements require, especially where you provide services to customers and are responsible for holding their data. These documents and their requirements are important not only if any contractual issues arise, but also to reference necessary information to provide service to the customer.

Anticipated or ongoing litigation or investigation

If incidents occur within the company, internal or external, relevant documents or communications can be useful in helping to understand the scope of the incident. For an internal investigation, relevant documents and communications can help by providing evidence of the event. For a legal incident that brings about litigation, your company will be required to produce relevant documents and communications to help the Court understand the scope of the incident.

If a company loses or destroys evidence that is relevant to the case, it can be sanctioned for spoliation. For example, when a company received a significant number of product complaints and destroyed the relevant documents after only three years, a court determined that spoliation had occurred. On the other hand, a court held that documents destroyed in the ordinary course of business relating to a 35-year-old product (that had never been in litigation) was not spoliation.

The Court’s decision often comes down to whether the party knew that litigation was coming, and whether a company’s data archiving policies are a factor in data deletion or retention.

What is a litigation hold?

During a litigation hold, a company takes steps to appropriately preserve documents needed for anticipated or initiated litigation. The litigation hold directs your company to preserve data that could be relevant evidence to the case. This means that if you have an automatic deletion or archiving program in place, that program will be paused so relevant documents are no longer deleted. Additionally, all employees involved will be directed not to delete documents or communications that may be relevant to the case.

If litigation does arise or is anticipated, it is prudent to work with legal counsel to initiate and maintain a litigation hold on the company.

What data can you get rid of?

It is not necessary to retain indefinitely every piece of data that your organization has, and while it might theoretically be possible to attempt to keep your data forever, it could often be very costly and burdensome. Additionally, the older the data is, the less useful it becomes; therefore, it is not worth the cost of keeping.

There are also times that the law requires you to delete certain data. Some compliance requirements, related to privacy or security for example, require the deletion of certain information when no longer necessary or after a certain period of time. For example, if you serve customers located in the European Union, GDPR provides certain rules that require companies to delete personal data once it has fulfilled its purpose.

If your company has data that doesn’t fit into any of its legal obligations, whether compliance or anticipated litigation, or its operational needs, the data can be deleted.

It is best practice to describe your company’s approach to retention in a documented retention policy to manage retention in a disciplined way. You can use this type of policy to respond to third-parties if you are ever required to explain why you don’t have certain documents.

What are the benefits of using technology to manage data retention?

While the hope is always that nothing goes wrong and litigation and investigations never arise, using technology to manage your retention will save you time and resources if problems do come up. A retention policy can be executed using a variety of technologies, such as an archiving program. With an archiving program, company admins can set up an archiving and deletion policy that will automatically move items to a user’s archive mailbox and delete items from that mailbox after a designated time. The admin places a retention time on messages to be moved to, then permanently deleted from, the archive.

Having an archiving program in place is one way to avoid spoliation if your organization ends up in litigation. Courts expect you to produce documents “in anticipation of litigation.” So, if you have a regular archiving policy in place, courts typically will not expect you to retrieve documents handled according to that policy before you anticipated litigation. Spoken in another way - If you practice a data retention policy (i.e., deleting emails that reach a certain age) and do not yet know about the complaint or the litigation, courts generally will not hold you liable to produce the information ...and its deletion during that time will generally not be considered spoliated.

Archiving technology can also simplify the process of putting a litigation hold in place. If you do anticipate litigation (for example, because an incident has occurred, a complaint has been received, or legal action has been taken), the company’s admin can place a simple litigation hold that will stop the deletion of data.

When litigation arises, having an archiving solution will create efficiencies for your team, saving you time and resources. You can easily access everything you (and the court) need without the burden of maintaining data forever. Click here for more information on information that ��Ƶɫ can archive on behalf of your organization.

Also recommended for you:

Download white paper from Osterman Research “Why You Must Archive All of Your Business Records”

Download Infographic “The Shift from Reactive to Proactive Compliance”

Secure Modern Workplace

��Ƶɫ Now Offers Archiving Capabilities for Microsoft Teams

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 01:00:00 +0000

��Ƶɫ Now Offers Archiving Capabilities for Microsoft Teams admin Wed, 11/18/2020 - 19:00 Archive ��Ƶɫ

As the majority of businesses continue to work remotely amid the pandemic – while coming to terms with the fact that this will likely be the norm for the foreseeable future – collaboration and productivity apps have become core to daily life. While these tools offer invaluable benefits in a world of remote work, they also present new challenges when it comes to compliance and record keeping for the sensitive company data that is constantly shared and discussed across these platforms.

Microsoft Teams is one of the leading virtual meeting and communication tools that has seen a serious uptick in daily users this year, shooting to over 75 million since March 2020. While its secure integration with Office 365 enables simple file sharing and collaboration for teammates working from home, its surging adoption is also raising concerns for compliance teams facing pressure by data regulation and auditing bodies to archive Teams data for regulatory and electronic discovery purposes.

Businesses shouldn’t have to tradeoff between productivity and security and ��Ƶɫ has made an information archiving solution that is compatible with Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to securely store Teams communications while meeting regulatory compliance.

By storing all Microsoft Teams communications with ��Ƶɫ’s information archive solution, it’s easy for legal and HR departments to carry out internal investigations, or for an organization to prove regulatory compliance to a third-party. The tedious process of using endless search criteria to filter through messages, file uploads, and other content across various platforms is drastically simplified with cross-platform archiving on a single pane of glass with custom search terms.

This new integration with Microsoft Teams is the latest example of how ��Ƶɫ’s archiving capabilities are constantly evolving along with the way people work, the tools they use, and new regulatory expectations facing businesses. It builds on last year’s expansion from email archiving to unified information archiving for 48 data sources spanning social media, instant message, mobile, web, audio and video.

Adding to the support ��Ƶɫ’s information archive solution already provides for apps like Slack, Workfront, Yammer, and Salesforce Chatter, the integration with Microsoft Teams now provides an added layer of security and compliance around yet another commonly used business communication tool.

Even when we begin to return to the office, the pandemic’s influence on workplace collaboration will be long lasting. More individuals than ever before will likely continue to work remotely in some capacity, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams will continue be a part of business operations. It’s important that organizations have an easy way to comprehensively capture all communications data to curate a compliant and ethical business environment, and that’s exactly what ��Ƶɫ’s information archive solution is providing with this new update.

For more information on ��Ƶɫ’s archiving capabilities, check out ��Ƶɫ’s information archiving datasheet and read more on Information Archiving. You can also request a demo from ��Ƶɫ here.

Securely Manage and Share Your Content with ��ƵɫArchive

admin — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 18:30:33 +0000

Securely Manage and Share Your Content with ��ƵɫArchive admin Mon, 06/17/2019 - 13:30 Archive ��Ƶɫ

Gone are the days when business communications occurred strictly via email. Today, important messaging might be transmitted across business-specific tools such as Slack or even via more casual apps like Facebook Messenger. Regardless of the medium used, companies are on the hook to maintain compliance across all channels of communication. It sounds like a difficult proposition, but ��ƵɫArchive is here to help.

��ƵɫArchive is a powerful cloud-based tool for securely archiving communications, allowing for easy eDiscovery while ensuring full legal and regulatory compliance. In addition, the tool archives far more than just email. In fact, as new communication channels arise, we will expand the scope of our solution to include the tools our customers need. Slack, Workfront, Yammer, and Salesforce Chatter are some of the current IM platforms we support, and Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business are coming this year.

Unparalleled Access to Your Archive

No matter what channel your business uses, ��ƵɫArchive comes with a robust set of features to help you manage your content. With the ability to classify data proactively and reactively, you can give in-house HR or legal teams the ability to survey content based on custom filters.

All data stored in ��ƵɫArchive is in an indexed table, complete with metadata, for fast and easy searching. And all data is stored on non-volatile memory express SSDs, making our search and storage technology Ferrari fast.

Indexed content is distilled into intuitive search categories, such as date ranges, keywords, or individual senders and recipients. In the past 15 years, we’ve refined our architecture to the point where we can pore through terabytes of email in seconds, either casting a very wide net or fishing on an extremely precise line.

Many users in compliance phases are required to conduct regular audits, especially in the financial services industry. Maybe regulations dictate they must survey 1% of employee emails or 1% that contain certain words or phrases. With ��ƵɫArchive, we have a sampling feature so you can quickly and effectively perform these types of audits.

For outbound communications, you could use the search function to make sure sales reps aren’t using profanity. On the inbound side, you can search for communications from disgruntled customers and make sure managers are notified whenever these are received. These workflows sound complicated, but ��ƵɫArchive makes them easy.

Say Hello to SimplyShare

Managing your content is important, but it’s also vital to be able to share it. For traditional content management systems, secure sharing has always been somewhat of a nightmare. Sending potentially hundreds of gigabytes of data to third parties such as legal teams or auditors used to require downloading it to a hard drive, encrypting it, and then mailing it via FedEx or UPS to the destination.

Once you send data outside your environment, you have no control over how it is treated, and you might have to repeat the process each time the search criteria that produced the data is revised. Using a cloud storage service such as Box or Dropbox sounds like a good option, but it will almost certainly violate compliance standards.

��Ƶɫ offers a way around expensive and time-consuming workloads because once the content is tagged or classified, it can be easily shared with other team members via ��Ƶɫ SimplyShare, a free tool that allows your team to share specific sets of data, regardless of size, with both internal and external parties.

At their core, ��ƵɫArchive and SimplyShare are about flexibility. Maybe you don’t want to store communications from one user group, but you want to store the messages of another group indefinitely. To complicate matters further, there’s a third group whose data you must retain for five years. When you partner with ��Ƶɫ, these parameters are easy to implement. Set it and forget it.

Current ��Ƶɫ customers will be familiar with our legendary deployment team and our gold-standard customer support. These same groups are ensuring that your experience with ��ƵɫArchive is exactly what you’ve come to expect from our team.

There are always concerns around storing sensitive data, but ��ƵɫArchive is designed to make sure data is an asset instead of a liability. Our solution is the most seamless way to collect and securely store data, and it gives our clients the peace of mind they deserve for staying on the right side of constantly changing regulations. To find out more about how your business can benefit from ��ƵɫArchive, contact us today.

Not Sure How to Get Compliant? Start with an Archive

admin — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 17:43:11 +0000

Not Sure How to Get Compliant? Start with an Archive admin Tue, 03/19/2019 - 12:43 Archive Geoff Bibby

Compliance is full of layers. Exploring and dealing with one layer often reveals another underneath. And the deeper you get, the harder it can be to understand the whole.

This is because regulations are rooted in laws which, by their nature, are always subject to an element of interpretation and subjectivity. Well-meaning administrators and auditors tasked with hammering out the details of implementation often create more confusion. Ask the same question to ten regulators, and you may get many varied answers.

Enforcement is also subjective. At the beginning of each year, regulators announce their enforcement priorities: social media, anti-money laundering, suitability, etc. The guidance is helpful but temporary. Firms have to scramble to respond to one issue, then prepare to switch to something else entirely twelve months later.

We know that measures like archiving are essential, even if their use isn’t specifically spelled out. That’s why archiving is frequently referred to as the 11th commandment (“Thou shalt archive”). But what about other data related requirements? Companies need to set clear rules and policies for data use, even when they lack clear guidance from regulators.

What data should be kept private and should it be stored in perpetuity? Where should backups be stored? How do companies keep data safe yet accessible? These are just a few of the difficult questions that must be answered whether or not a particular regulation explicitly addresses them. Otherwise, compliance will always be a struggle to manage.

Building Everything From Your Archive

Companies can’t wait for regulators. Instead, they should be proactive when it comes to compliance. Even though archiving is widely recognized as a foundation of compliance efforts, its impact is bigger than most realize.

Archiving can be a terrific tool for disaster recovery — a problem that creates regulatory issues all its own. Recovering information is as easy as accessing your archive. With strong discovery tools in place, restoring lost information can be an almost effortless task. This is just one example of how archiving helps manage and minimize a variety of potential risks at once.

Archiving can also be extremely useful in protecting against human error. Even when deleting emails is prohibited by company policy, many employees still do it from time to time, often accidentally. Archiving ensures these mistakes don’t lead to fines or other forms of regulatory action. Auditors and regulators don’t have to be concerned when emails are missing from the inbox as long as they also exist in the archive.

Mining the Value of Information

Recovering from data loss is not the only advantage of maintaining a next generation archive. Artificial intelligence applied to vast data sets (like archives) can be used to proactively uncover errors and inconsistencies. For instance, if there are mistakes on an expense report, AI can find them so that they can be corrected. While it would be impractical and impossible for humans to spot all these issues, it’s intuitive for AI.

Archives also hide a wealth of potential new business. Records of all previous client interactions provide a chance to analyze the data to learn when your outreach might yield new opportunities. These records and digital touchpoints also contain valuable insights that can be leveraged to improve performance and determine organizational best practices.

Taking Advantage of Your Archive

Operating without a next generation archive is a huge gamble. From possible compliance violations and legal exposure to lost emails and conversations, the consequences are daunting. Even if you already have a solution in place, ��Ƶɫ recommends you periodically review it and explore potential alternatives. Once you’ve selected and implemented a platform, you can take these steps to get the most out of it:

Engage with the data: Archives shouldn’t collect dust. Instead of seeing archives as data repositories, think of them as informational resources. Archives contain valuable insights that are unique to your organization. Also, by virtue of their scope, they give information important context that can otherwise be hard to capture.
Ask urgent questions: Archives can help answer almost any question, so what information are you missing today that you wish was available? Instead of making a vague plan to leverage your archive, start with concrete questions. It’s amazing once you discover just how much in-depth insight archives can provide.
Archive everything: Don’t stop with just email. New technology makes it possible to include all types of business communications in your archive. This includes a variety of instant message tools and even social media channels. As the variety of communication media expands, make sure you have a platform that can keep pace.
Empower employees: Archives are valuable to everyone, not just executives, compliance managers, or IT pros. Allowing more teams, individuals and departments to explore your archive extends the benefits as broadly as possible.

There is an old saying: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” As regulations and the regulators who enforce them continue to change all around you, your archive can be like a guiding eye. Use the steps outlined above to ensure you’re taking full advantage of the latest advances in archiving.

Archive