C2C Recommends Two-Step Process to Meet Freedom of Information Act Data Challenge

24th January 2005

Two simple steps — and two C2C Systems products — will help public authorities manage and access data to meet the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“Starting January 1, 2005, FOIA legislation applies to a wide range of public authorities,” says Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. “FOIA presents a challenge for records administrators to provide — to a timed deadline — information requested by an individual. This means a potentially huge increase in requests for email discovery to those responsible for its administration.”

C2C advocates a two-step approach to provide an immediate response to problems presented by the act as well as a long-term management strategy for data retrieval and retention.

STEP ONE: Start Search and Discovery
C2C’s Active Folders Content Manager scans and discovers messages across an entire email system — in fact, the product can analyse 1,600 messages per second. The search engine scans emails and their attachments on the central server and in mailboxes as well as locates hard-to-find or hidden email in PSTs, even those saved locally and on laptops. Nearly 50 criteria can be combined to perform searches down to the most granular level — from the most obvious use of dates to the most obscure terms hidden in an attachment.

“E-mail discovery does carry some inherent problems,” Hunt says. “It is unstructured data and is not pre-indexed for fast, centralised searches across all users and data stores. Messages also have many formats — copy significant to a FOIA request can be in the subject line or email body, even hidden in attachments or in embedded emails. Active Folders finds it all, and will provide immediate results to meet FOIA requirements.”

STEP TWO: Establish Retention Policies
C2C also recommends establishing central retention and storage policies for email. Archive One is built on the same forensic discovery engine as Active Folders, and provides the means to establish a detailed email policy that can be tailored for an organization. Setting up indexed archive repositories by key term, department or other subject is entirely possible, leaving future FOIA requests accessible yet secure.

“Instituting a long-term email archiving project to index and archive according to retention policies will provide consistent storage and recovery,” says Hunt. “This is important when you need to find data fast.”

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