Jatheon Email Archiving Blog

Where eDiscovery is concerned, we have seen increasing legal clarity, credibility and standards of practice. Where there has not been legal clarity is in the area of government searches and acquisitions of electronic communication.

The issues lie in clarifying what permissions are needed to obtain company or individual’s information when it is hosted on a third party server. With hosted email and cloud-based email archiving growing in popularity every day, this legal clarity on government acquisitions is long over due.

Having an effective eDiscovery system in place is a saving grace for many companies, especially in cases of litigation and maintaining compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.

Now, the International Organization for Standardization is weighing in on the eDiscovery issue, but what will this mean for company data and information systems?

We’re all reliant on search engines. Every day we use them to find websites and answer life’s troubling questions, like ‘who am I?’, ‘where do we come from?’ and ‘where can I watch videos of cats dancing to Gangnam Style?’. Search engines serve a very important function, so it is important that they are user friendly. If using Google was complicated, people wouldn’t use it. The simplicity of typing in a word or phrase and getting an immediate answer is priceless. This is the same reason email archiving is so beneficial to businesses. Just as with Google, you don’t need to be a tech-whizz to master email archiving.

Easy to Use

An email passes through a company’s spam filters. The email archiving system then takes the email and stores the message and its attachments. If you want to access that message at a later date, it’s as simple as entering a search in to the archiving program and hitting search. It really is that easy.

There are many invisible threats that exist in business, such as system failures. Similarly there are many invisible forms of protection you may employ in business that you can see – like purchasing insurance, but just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t actively working to protect your business.

Death and taxes. These are apparently the two things we all must accept in life. They are inevitable. Any attempts to avoid them will either land you in jail or you’ll spend your entire life trying to come up with some kind of elixir that makes you immortal. For businesses there is another inevitability to expect: eDiscovery requests. The county council of Clarksville, Tennessee learned that life lesson before they ended up with egg on their face. Let’s look at why installing an email archiving system was important for them and why it should be important to your business.

Why have an email archiving policy? Are you ever really going to need to access your email archive? You might think you’ll never need it, but just like the airbags in your car, someday the email archiving policy you established many moons ago may just be your saviour. The school board of Bossier, Louisiana learned that the hard way when they failed to produce emails requested by attorney John E. Settle. In the end the judge deemed that there was no cause of action in the lawsuit and the school board were off the hook. But there are still lessons to be learned from this example of a poor archiving policy.

They say the truth will out. That statement has never felt truer than it does this week. As we prepared for Lance Armstrong’s confession last night most of us found ourselves reading about a young sportsman who has found himself wrapped up in another web of lies. It’s incredible to see the two stories fall in line so perfectly.               

In business, you encounter a lot of loops. It seems like every system, every solution and every procedure is circular. We see charts, presentations and documents every day that talk about assessment, implementation, monitoring and repetition. It’s all circles. It all comes back to the beginning and starts again.

A lot of what we do is automatic. We don’t walk around thinking ‘left, right, left, right’; we can’t forget to breathe. Our instincts allow us to ignore vital daily requirements; they allow us to focus on other things because we live without thinking.

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.