How much data do I need to keep?
If your company is subject to industry or federal regulations, visit MessageSolution’s Compliance Resources web page to determine what requirements are set forth in each law or standard.
If retention of all business-related records is mandated, then keeping everything but obvious spam is vital. MessageSolution provides two methods of archiving emails and attachments using Enterprise Email Archive. Organizations requiring full records retention are best served by implementing real-time archiving.
About Real-Time Archiving:
- Also known as journaling or journal archiving, real-time archiving is the process of capturing emails and attachments as they pass through the email server’s journal box, archiving every communication record.
- Archiving in real-time eliminates the danger of accidentally losing emails when employees delete from their inbox because a copy is saved in the archive before it even reaches the employee’s inbox.
About Batch Archiving:
- Batch archiving consists of archiving on a regular interval (every night, every two days, etc.).
- Batch archiving lets users filter out unnecessary emails and attachments that waste archive space. It allows organizations to retain emails and attachments based on a variety of factors, such as sender, recipient, the recipient’s role in the organization, attachment size or format, etc.
How long should I retain data?
- First, determine the retention periods required by any regulations your organization might fall under.
- The most ubiquitous of these is Sarbanes-Oxley, which applies to all publicly-traded companies and mandates a retention period of no less than 7 years. Regardless of length, all compliance requires organizations to be able to access their historical emails and files in a reasonable amount of time.
- If compliance is a non-issue, then your business needs will determine how long your employees and legal department want to retain emails. Some departments will require access to their emails and files for longer periods of time, perhaps because of lengthy projects or long-standing customer accounts.
- MessageSolution’s Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive are extremely granular, giving organizations the ability to set various retention policies for entire geographic locations, departments, groups, or even individual employees.
