If you run a business, it is likely that you will have to face a lawsuit at some point. And since we live in a digital age, you will have to be able to present documents and evidence from a variety of sources, many of which are electronic. That in itself should be enough to look into email archiving solutions! If you have to supply evidence from instant messengers, emails, accounting databases, Offices files, CAM/CAD files, video and sound recordings, websites, social media postings, and more, you have to have a solution in place to find all of that easily and quickly. When a court tells you that you have to provide evidence, they don’t care about how difficult it is for you to find things because you didn’t properly manage your repository, they just want the evidence, and they want it today.
Different E-Discovery Rules
A number of new regulations are in place, including the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), and these have changed the world of compliance. Those regulations must be adhered to, and they state that data retention policies must be in place so that managers can easily and quickly find any data required for discovery. If the claimant in a lawsuit is the company, then they must disclose their e-discovery policies the first time they have a meeting with the defendant. These policies must include guidelines on the timeframe in which they can produce data. Should they not be able to produce data as outlined in their own policies, they will face hefty fines.
What makes things overwhelming for many companies, however, is that they produce so much data on a daily basis. In fact, in 2007, the Radicati Group completed a study that showed every user in an organization generates around 4.3 GB of data each year. Additionally, they expected this to grow to 6.7 GB per year by 2011, something that they were likely correct in. The vast majority of this data is email data. Indeed, IDC has reported that there is a doubling of email volume every five years, now standing at around 40 billion emails per day worldwide. Those are staggering amounts, and they are also set to grow by around 18% per year.
Luckily, thanks to email archiving and other e-discovery solutions, there are ways to ensure compiling electronic data is easier now. Best of all, these solutions are designed to understand the type of emails that come in, meaning that they can instantly filter out spam messages as well. This ensures that businesses continue to comply with the various rules and regulations, while at the same time not having to worry about the messages that don’t count – the thousands of spam messages received daily.
The most important thing of all, however, is that some sort of solution is put in place. These regulations are there for a very good reason, including your own protection as a business. They must, therefore, be adhered to.
