Messaging News - June 2008 - (Page 14)

CLASSIFICATION & RETENTION documents and apply it to email. “If we look at classification there is only three or four ways to approach the problem. It is clear that Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and regulations put requirements on organizations to keep information for a certain amount of time. If you want to figure out which ones you need to keep, you can sort by the content, sort based on metadata from the mailbox—such as who the person is sending or receiving that email—or you can have people manually file, so that it is based on someone’s decision. Really from our perspective, the only thing that works best is the automated filing, based on who sent or received it.” While content analysis technologies are available, D’Arcy offers an example of why it can be challenging, “One of the most important emails ever sent in the entire company may just have the word ‘yes’. There is no classification engine that can know if the one word email that has said ‘yes’ is something which needs to be kept.” Alan Elliot, VP of marketing for Mirapoint, has similar thoughts on approaching retention via content scanning. “Content filters, can be relatively good, but they do not catch the intent of the message as much as they catch the lexicon,” he says. “However, the lexical analysis may not be sufficient to cover an organization if they are trying to be prudent. What we are seeing traditionally is a broader based set of archiving requirements that tend to focus on the users roles, more so than on the content, although content can be and is one of the many criteria—after all, email content scanning has been around for years searching for spam.” Not only did the court in the AMD vs. Intel lawsuit specifically state a preference for an automated mechanism to store messages (as opposed to instructions delivered to an employee to do so manually), but most experts also agree it is the preferred method to classify messages. “Although users can label emails themselves, relying on them to label emails correctly is not a reliable method, as a user might forget to label an email,” summarizes Vella. “Categorization at the organizational level means that all the users who have access to that particular email will be able to see the label and they can search for all the emails categorized with that label. Automatic archiving makes most sense because the process is managed from a central location and every email is archived according to the policies in place.” Adding to the argument in favor of automation, D’Arcy says “it has been found that if you have users manually determine of their own email what is kept, or not, it tends to drift over time, so that an individual will wind up marking everything as needing to be retained, or nothing has needing to be retained. It is very difficult to audit and make sure that users are making good decisions on a message-by-message basis.” The Policy Osterman explains that because email is now included in about 75 percent of all e-Discovery proceedings, an organization’s ability to preserve this content for the appropriate length of time, in the right form and in a manner that makes it easy to access over the long term will be increasingly critical. “This will dictate the use of archiving systems that can automatically index incoming content, place it into archival storage where the chain of custody for the data can be demonstrated and allow it to be searched quickly and easily over long periods.” Consensus on what to keep and how long is aided by the regulations, but that does require some interpretation and determining which ones apply to which organizations. One of the reasons that companies have been slow to comply with the new requirements is that there are typically many stakeholders involved in setting retention policies. According to the Email Archiving Practices Email Archiving Tips Email has become, in less than a decade, the central repository of corporate information and the de-facto mode of communication. Without email, commerce comes to a screeching halt. As a result corporations are now tasked with the continuous challenge of managing and protecting its electronic property all while meeting new regulations. In order to preserve the corporate memory and protect against the threats of litigation and e-Discovery, many organizations are turning to email archiving as a prudent data retention strategy. However, before initiating an email archiving solution there are a few steps that Security and Compliance Experts and IT Managers should take. 1. Write an email archiving policy. Involve Corporate Counsel, HR and your IT Department as key stakeholders in this process. Make sure that your policy complies with the privacy regulations both domestic and international. 2. Define a policy that includes: What should be retained, for how long, who is covered by this policy. Make sure that your users are not circumventing the email retention policy by archiving messages on their PC’s. 3. Make sure your email network is properly protected and configured for email archiving. Since spam accounts for over 80 percent of the inbound email it is critical that the email hygiene solution be working properly. 4. Subscribe to an email reputation service that allows your company to reject spam without actually filtering the email. 5. Invest in a disaster recovery plan that protects your company data in case of a major event. TMP Source: Mirapoint 14 MESSAGING NEWS JUNE 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - June 2008

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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