Email archival is an important part of record keeping for companies, organizations and government agencies. It is just as essential as keeping physical records of paper documents pertinent to a company's operations. This is why companies should also invest in archiving solutions that will sufficiently cover their business goals and compliant archiving needs.
Now is a good time as any to start archiving your email and instant messaging information, so you can easily migrate to an effective email compliance solution. New rules on e-discovery requires businesses and organizations to have an archival policy in place but even if you have yet to implement such a standard, you want to start collecting data to store to get you started on organizing information in your database.
Growth trends
The good thing about early email archival is that you can track the growth trends of your email retention while you are still in the process of drafting your retention policies. This allows you to get a good idea on what type of information your company has to store and the security measures that should be in place to prevent unauthorized access. This knowledge will come in handy when you're searching for an email archival solution that will best suit your current needs.
Keeping it simple
As much as possible, you want to keep the retention procedure on archiving email simple. There has to be the right balance between auditability and completeness. You want broader categories for email archiving and a smaller number of retention periods so you don't have to identify exact retention periods for every type of information. This will make it easier for legal research to focus on the record types that can represent the highest risk or cost for the company.
You want to start with simpler retention periods such as one year, five years, and ten years. You can also add in a group for indefinite retention as needed. Match the periods to the requirements of the type of records that you keep.
Exceptions
You want to leave room to email archival exceptions as far as record retention is concerned. Employees should be educated on how to recognize these exceptions and manage them. For instance, emails that need to be retained for a longer period than is normal could either be printed out so the printout can be archived or they could also be copied and converted to a Word document file if such types of documents are archived for a longer time.
DataCove offers you with a comprehensive email archiving solution regardless of the size and type of your business. Contact us through this website for details.
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