“Most companies are sitting ducks,” says Nancy Flynn, founder and executive director of the ePolicy Institute. “They don’t realize that E-mail is the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence.”
Bill Gates wasn’t thinking about that when he sent messages to Microsoft executives in 1996 discussing the need for the company to increase its share of the Web browser market. Two years later, he had to explain his written statements under oath when the federal government accused the company of violating antitrust laws when it crushed Netscape in the Web browser market. Watching Gates squirm–and grab headlines–in a court case involving E-mail should have been fair warning to all business executives and other high-ranking officials to exercise greater caution when writing E-mails.
Failure to get a handle on E-mail–and soon instant messages and blogs and other forms of business communications–can cost companies money and their reputations. Morgan Stanley learned that lesson the hard way. It’s been hit with millions of dollars in Securities and Exchange Commission and court fines as well as legal judgments for violating E-mail retention rules. And it’s been embarrassed by archived mail introduced in a wrongful termination case that showed, among other things, its CTO hitting up vendors for tickets to sporting events.
Many industries have regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in health care, and all public companies are governed by Sarbanes-Oxley. “The first thing my clients want to see now is E-mail and E-mail attachments,” says Eric Blank, managing attorney of law firm Blank Law & Technology, which specializes in electronic evidence detection. If a company has to review millions of pages of E-mail, legal fees of $300 an hour can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The average company creates at least a million messages each day, Forrester Research estimates. But technology tools and services can help companies monitor and manage that E-mail, including specialized archiving, retrieval, and discovery software.
Blank turned to archiving software from Postini to sort through the messages, eliminate the captured spam, and create files of relevant E-mail for use in regulatory compliance.
Transatlantic Reinsurance, a provider of insurance to the insurance industry, operates within a “very litigious environment, as the insurance industry is highly scrutinized,” says Socrates Pichardo, VP of IT. The company was receiving numerous search requests from its IT and legal teams that required the manual review of thousands of E-mails. The offering lets customers automate information collection and archiving and avoid the “save everything” strategy by saving only what needs to be saved.
Consultants offer advice on classification and policy services, records management and assessment, E-mail archiving assessment, tape restoration and migration planning, and data erasure.
Businesses in the past year have shifted their attention from border security to regulatory compliance, so the services company needs to help its customers retain messages for compliance reasons as well as preserve other valuable communications.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187200562