Compliance & Discovery

For organizations that need to reduce the legal risks associated with e-mail by increasing compliance to regulatory and government requirements, enforcing internal policy and searching for and controlling email content.

Senior managers are now becoming aware of the importance of e-mail in terms of the liability associated with content, the regulatory and legal requirements to retain information for defined periods and the need to protect the e-mail accounts from unwanted intrusion.

For many organizations, 'Compliance' is required to regulatory or industry bodies, and usually refers to the secure maintenance of indexed records for a certain period of time. Email is regarded in most cases as a company record, and must be treated alongside all other media, to avoid the threat of litigation or fines from the overseeing industry bodies. These include NASD, SEC, HIPAA. However, email is specific in its format and any solution to ensure compliance must be built to maintain full integrity of the email. Keeping the message in its original Exchange format is essential for its recovery for legal proof or otherwise.

Compliance can also relate to internal and content-driven e-Policy; scheduled audits or one-off actions are important to many organizations, e.g. to maintain a clear policy on jokes and other attachments that could be seen as offensive. Locating and moving or deleting some emails can also clear redundant space on servers and increase performance. Auditing and updating email and public folder permissions can equally maintain a secure and acceptable email environment, preventing access inconsistencies that could lead to embarrassment or worse.

Discovery simply refers to the need to search for and find email and/or attachements, cost-effectively and quickly. Automated searches of all possible email repositories by multiple criteria can save finger-tip searches and huge expenses. This can help with virus detection in the Exchange servers, should other mechanisms fail.

• Active Folders Content Manager
• ESRA (Exchange Security Risk Auditor)