The phrase ‘third-party’ is used a lot in business. Organizations use third-party providers for many vital functions, because they don’t have the facilities themselves. Email archiving is often referred to as a third-party solution.
When it comes to e-discovery, you rely on another third party, your legal team. In completion of those requests, your legal team will bring in a fourth party, an email audit provider. The question for business owners is which ‘third-party’ would you prefer to use?
Search:
Email Archiving solutions make it easy to identify email through a simple search function. Your email is filed within the archive and, as long as you’re using a high-quality solution, can be easily recovered.
Email Audits of email systems that don’t have an archive can be time consuming. It requires the running of tapes, auditing of data and manual assessment of emails. If you don’t have an archive, there will be little or no structure in your email storage. Your email audit team may have to go through literally every email remaining on your backups to find the ones you need.
Collate:
The email archiving process collates email as they are being stored. The archive builds the mails into a structure so that, when required, the files can easily be pulled from a single location and collated. Email archiving solutions allow all of this to be done online.
When you engage an email audit team to complete an e-discovery request, you are asking them to pull data from numerous different locations. Every piece of data they pull will then need to be assessed and moved to a single location. The collation process in e-discovery can be complex because you’re dealing with different formats at different speeds with different equipment.
Deliver:
Once you have collated the emails pulled from your email archiving solution, you can easily identify which is the original, required email through built in timestamps. You can then deliver the data in its original format.
Email audit delivery is far more complex. Because the collation was done manually, you may have multiple copies of the same mail, in different formats. Delivery of the original mail in original format is vital in e-discovery. Email audits provide no guarantee that you will be able to do that.
Email archiving and email audit providers both make e-discovery requests easier on an organization. That’s what third-party providers are for. It’s just a matter of choosing the one that fits your business.
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