Billions of emails being sent every day and the number increasing daily, and critical business processes like sales orders, customer service etc. have made email a necessity. Email compliance is something organizations need to seriously consider as there has been a surge in government regulations that make it mandatory for large and small businesses alike to include: protection of customer information, corporate governance, law enforcement investigations and to ensure that email is used and managed properly. The consequences of not complying can be serious as organizations will have to deal with penalties, litigations, HR problems and damage to companies’ reputations..
The United States’ Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) demand certain industries and publicly traded companies comply with a framework of legislation relevant to email around the IT security pillars of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Email is treated as equal to paper documents and is admissible in a court of law. These documents can be requested by the courts or attorneys in the form of an eDiscovery request.
Compliance has the ability to vastly improve business operations and is ultimately in a corporation’s best interest. Managing risk, streamlining processes and standardizing data management are just a few of the benefits of compliance efforts.
Manage Email – Organizations that fall under industry or government regulations need much more protection than just the regular backing up of email on a disk. The disadvantage of this is that daily backups are run at the end of the work day, so any emails that employees delete during the day won’t be stored. Your organization’s email contains confidential and important information and needs to be archived for future reference. Email archiving uses automated journaling to capture all emails and immediately archive them on a separate server. The e-mail in the data folder can be encrypted and compressed so that they cannot be changed or altered and also, less file space is needed. This not only protects vital corporate data from deletion but also can limit employee access to archived data. With email archiving, employee activity can be tracked, thus making the system more secure.
Data Management – Storage can be an issue due to insufficient data management. Apart from official mail, there is lots of junk mail and personal mail floating around. If this mail is not sorted out, your storage devices can overflow pretty quickly. The easiest answer is to use an email archiving solution with built-in mail filtering capabilities. This way only relevant mail will be archived.
Standard Practices – Just like you have proper policy guidelines and rules for other organizational functions, organizations must also implement standardized email compliance practices that adhere to industry or government regulatory compliance requirements. Once a policy is implemented, it is important to advise your users that you have an e-mail compliance archive which captures all incoming and outgoing email irrespective of whether they are internal or external.
Users need to be aware of their access rights to their email in the email compliance archive. This will make users aware that only systems administrators or similarly privileged users can view all or any e-mails together with attachments in the email compliance data base and this awareness can act as a deterrent to email abuse.
Implementing a successful email compliance policy can save you time, money and resources in case of an e-Discovery request or litigation. The right email compliance policy guidelines need not be costly if implemented in the right way. It should run smoothly in the background without hindering your day to day functioning.
The United States’ Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) demand certain industries and publicly traded companies comply with a framework of legislation relevant to email around the IT security pillars of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Email is treated as equal to paper documents and is admissible in a court of law. These documents can be requested by the courts or attorneys in the form of an eDiscovery request.
Compliance has the ability to vastly improve business operations and is ultimately in a corporation’s best interest. Managing risk, streamlining processes and standardizing data management are just a few of the benefits of compliance efforts.
Manage Email – Organizations that fall under industry or government regulations need much more protection than just the regular backing up of email on a disk. The disadvantage of this is that daily backups are run at the end of the work day, so any emails that employees delete during the day won’t be stored. Your organization’s email contains confidential and important information and needs to be archived for future reference. Email archiving uses automated journaling to capture all emails and immediately archive them on a separate server. The e-mail in the data folder can be encrypted and compressed so that they cannot be changed or altered and also, less file space is needed. This not only protects vital corporate data from deletion but also can limit employee access to archived data. With email archiving, employee activity can be tracked, thus making the system more secure.
Data Management – Storage can be an issue due to insufficient data management. Apart from official mail, there is lots of junk mail and personal mail floating around. If this mail is not sorted out, your storage devices can overflow pretty quickly. The easiest answer is to use an email archiving solution with built-in mail filtering capabilities. This way only relevant mail will be archived.
Standard Practices – Just like you have proper policy guidelines and rules for other organizational functions, organizations must also implement standardized email compliance practices that adhere to industry or government regulatory compliance requirements. Once a policy is implemented, it is important to advise your users that you have an e-mail compliance archive which captures all incoming and outgoing email irrespective of whether they are internal or external.
Users need to be aware of their access rights to their email in the email compliance archive. This will make users aware that only systems administrators or similarly privileged users can view all or any e-mails together with attachments in the email compliance data base and this awareness can act as a deterrent to email abuse.
Implementing a successful email compliance policy can save you time, money and resources in case of an e-Discovery request or litigation. The right email compliance policy guidelines need not be costly if implemented in the right way. It should run smoothly in the background without hindering your day to day functioning.
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