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4 Best Practice Guidelines for Managing Email Archiving & Electronic Content

Managing Electronic Content Fiona Mulvaney – Waterford Technologies Every day I talk to IT Managers who are experiencing problems in managing their

Managing Electronic Content

Fiona Mulvaney – Waterford Technologies

Every day I talk to IT Managers who are experiencing problems in managing their organisation’s email systems & who are struggling to understand how to manage electronic content. 

Examples of the types of problems which I encountered in my discussions with IT Manager’s recently include;

  • Our Head Office has just introduced a Retention Policy & I need to have a solution to enforce this policy.
  • An organisation is migrating to Microsoft Office 365 & they need to have a separate email archive in place.
  • An organisation is being split into two separate organisations & they need to separate their email data.
  • Employee has recently left the organisation and prior to leaving deleted all of their email data.
  • Two organisations are merging together and need to manage the consolidation of their email data.
  • A recent audit was conducted & one of the recommendations was to put an email archiving system in place.

In trying to decide what to do about these problems questions are raised about what is the best way to manage electronic content.  An Osterman Research White Paper which was published in July 2013 called “ Best Practices for Managing Email Archiving” provides us with four key issues to consider for any organization in the context of managing its electronic content.

 The Four Key Issues Are:

  1. All organizations should archive their relevant electronic information in order to satisfy their legal, regulatory and other external retention requirements.as well as to maintain good server performance and the ability for their end users to find important, older content.
  2. A failure to archive content can result in a variety of consequences, some of which can be quite serious and costly on both a legal and regulatory level, as well as for overall system and application performance.
  3. While email has been the traditional starting point for archiving business records and other relevant content, the practice of archiving is evolving and will require organizations to manage a growing number of different content types, including social media content, files, voicemails, etc.
  4.  A key element of good archive planning is the ability to migrate between archiving providers when necessary, and to migrate archives to the cloud if management decides that doing so will reduce costs or provide other benefits.

Organizations that do not plan on a migration to a new archiving platform run the serious risk of being unable to satisfy their long-term retention needs in a cost-effective way.

There are many considerations which need to be taken on board in planning your email archiving strategy, talk to us today and we can provide you with our advice and best practice email archiving guidelines.