Compliance/E-Mail Archiving

There has been a plethora of high profile privacy and security breaches which has led to the enforcement of these regulations becoming a well-funded and high priority item.  Implementing a solution to address the regulatory compliance challenge is no longer optional, as failure to do so can put your company or organisation at risk.

Although data is subject to regulatory compliance, regulations can vary by industry. One can generalise that many records pertaining to your daily business, such as activities and correspondence between organisations, employees, and individuals, are subject to compliance regulations. These records might include personal, financial and other digital records such as medical and health information, digital audio and video files, and e-mail messages and archives.

Corporate and Public Sector executives and IT management face a dilemma: divert scarce resources to cover increased management and storage costs, or accept the risk of regulatory enforcement actions and penalties. As IT professionals, the goal of your regulatory compliance strategy must be to minimise your company’s or organisation’s exposure to litigation, fines, and reputation damage whilst ensuring value for money.

Data storage is a major component of any regulatory compliance process. The new regulations mandate that you retain your data for significantly longer periods of time. The spiralling expansion of this compliance data will change your organisation’s fundamental IT infrastructure. Your organisation has to manage several concurrent requirements, which often seem at odds with each other:

• You need to provide information to authorised users anywhere, anytime.
• You need to reduce the potentially catastrophic risk of non-compliance by strictly complying with regulations.
• You need to keep your costs down.
• You need to create ways to leverage the new data to benefit other areas of the business.

Although each of the regulations is unique, there are three recurring themes that have a direct effect on a company’s Storage Strategy.

The first of these in Data Permanence. This is the concept that data must be saved to media that cannot be altered or erased until a specified expiration date. The second is Data Security. Security requirements vary widely, but almost every entity is subject to some type of security regulation. And thirdly, is Auditability. Having a secure audit trail is at the heart of this requirement.

Examples of some of the Compliancy Acts/Regulations are listed below:

• Freedom of Information Act (Government Bodies – UK)
• Data Protection Act (European Operations and Global Firms – European Union)
• Sarbanes-Oxley (Public Companies and Accounting Firms – USA)
• HIPAA (Health Insurance and Healthcare Providers – USA)
• Basel II (Financial Services – G-10 Nations)

To ensure meeting compliancy regulations, it is imperative to implement a policy of retention of electronic data/information within your organisation. This can typically be tackled by introducing an Archiving policy which applies to both E-Mail and other types of electronically created documents, such as Letters, Database Records, Financial Information, HR Records, Company Forms, etc.

Software Applications are now readily available for both General Archiving, otherwise referred to as HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) or ILM (Information or Data Lifecycle Management), together with more specialist applications for E-Mail Management and Compliancy.

Compusys work with a selective number of Storage Software Vendors who provide these types of applications, as well as a number of Tier 1 Storage Hardware Manufacturers who build the necessary platforms to store this information in its right place at the right time, and would welcome the opportunity to help develop your archiving and storage strategies. Contact Compusys storage specialists on 01296 505321 or email storage@compusys.co.uk