Messaging News - June 2008 - (Page 12)

CLASSIFICATION & RETENTION and receives some 170 emails a day while at work, and revealed that 33 percent of them use personal email accounts at least once or twice a week for business purposes—17 percent of those did so every day. Furthermore, 15.7 percent of respondents admitted to using their personal email to avoid corporate review or retention of their messages. “With the increasing importance of email as a business communications tool, the fact that employees are conducting business through outside email accounts leaves businesses with no formal email record of those emails, making them vulnerable to all sorts of risks,” warns Osterman. “This underscores the tremendous importance for businesses to ensure they are covered with a strong email archiving solution that stores, tracks and locates all of an organization’s email.” The survey also indicated that 60 percent of employees use a personal email account to conduct business communications when the corporate email server goes down. Indeed, the first step to ensuring proper retention of business email might be to ban personal email accounts from being used for business. Classifying Email Is email classification an important part of a retention strategy? “That depends on two things: the underlying capabilities of the email infrastructure; and the specific needs of individual organizations,” responds Duncan Greatwood, CEO of PostPath. “For email infrastructures that scale poorly, and so require frequent content deletion or offloading, content classification can be useful as a means of determining what to keep, and where to keep it. That said, an email infrastructure with improved scalability and massive (“bottomless”) mailboxes can largely eliminate this need. Beyond that, some companies, especially in heavily regulated industries, have the need to classify content for legal and/or compliance purposes— for instance, are employees sending emails that they should not be sending, either internally or externally? Typically these compliance-driven content analysis actions will take place before an In order to be prepared, organizations need an active and comprehensive retention policy ensuring its archiving systems properly retain relevant records. Individuals chartered with the responsibility need to know where all of that email is and how to get to it when the regulators (or lawyers) come calling. Just as important, they need to know how long the regulatory timelines require the information be stored. Below is a synopsis of various timelines established by regulations that affect numerous companies. Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 Similar to the Fair Labor Standrds Act, this Act implements a threeyear retention requirement for payroll and related records containing information about the employee’s identity such as the name, address, date of birth, and rate of pay. In addition, employers must keep for one year information such as job applications, resumes, or other job inquiry information. This also includes other information such as job postings. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Requirements under the ADA mirror the requirements of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Generally, retention is one year. Davis-Bacon and Copeland Act Employers with federally funded projects should keep information for two years, including records relating to the periods of contract, pay records and work records. Employee Polygraph Protection Act Records relating to reasons for conducting polygraph examination and other related materials must be kept for three years. Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) ERISA regulations actually specify the use of electronic media for retention of records, and demand Paul D’Arcy, Director of Marketing for Dell MessageOne email is delivered, though they can also be applied to archived emails after the fact.” According to David Vella, director of product management for GFI Software, the implementation of categorization policies in an email archiving strategy serves one main purpose: that of making it easier for searches to be made for a specific subject area or department. “Categorization policies enable you to categorize emails at the organization level, by labeling emails based on content before they are stored in the archive stores,” he says. “For example, you can configure a categorization policy that labels emails with the label ‘Sales’ if they contain the keyword ‘advert’ in the body or subject, and are sent or received by the following address, sales@master-domain.com. Thus a search for an email that originated from the Sales department would be easier to trace because all salesrelated emails would have been labeled beforehand thus narrowing down the search to a specific label. When it comes to classifying D’Arcy observes that we tend to take document classification rules that have existed for a long time for paper 12 MESSAGING NEWS JUNE 2008

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Messaging News - June 2008 Editor’s Note Short Takes Classification & Retention Spam: Bigger, Faster, and More Dangerous Bad Behavior and Today’s Reputation Analysis The Changing Locus of Collaboration Serving Up Managed and Hosted Messaging Solutions “On Message” with Ben Gross SCAP Standard Benefits Both Government and Commercial Space Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - June 2008

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