As Tom Peters once said, “almost all quality improvement comes through the simplification of design, manufacturing, layout, processing and procedures”.

In automated archiving, the essence of automation is to increase efficiency, simplify email management procedures and improve both speed and accuracy. “Set it and forget it” is the golden principle of automation that is also applicable to large-scale archiving of electronic communications.

Email Retention Laws Then and Now

Following the advancement of email, document retention laws (including Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, FOIA, FRCP and others) were amended to include electronically stored information, like email, social media and business information exchanged over the phone or mobile apps.

Before automated…

Having an email retention policy is important for a number of reasons — the major two being the need to save space on your email server and the need to stay in line with federal and industry record-keeping regulations.

Defining how long your company will keep email communication can prove more challenging than you initially thought. The first stumbling block is that different departments will advocate for different retention windows.

How long should your retention policy really be?

There are both positive and negative aspects of having a longer retention policy, the main pros being business continuity and the fact that executives rely on old email chains to…

Smarsh is a household name in the data archiving industry, providing archiving, compliance and information management services to the financial industry and government sector.

And in 2020, it was named leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for enterprise information archiving for the sixth consecutive year.

However, despite its cited completeness of vision, Smarsh doesn’t work for all companies.

Its complex, often vague pricing, unavailability of functions, slow search, lack of technical support and documentation often cause issues for users.

Large companies in particular face unpleasantries, in the form of unexpected costs which can amount to twice as much as originally…

Since most organizations implement email and social media archiving solutions to automate regulatory compliance and speed up open data request response times, they often forget the crucial component that is entwined with all the reasons behind archiving ‒ the human factor.

Employee investigation can be the result of various HR-related scenarios that require the HR and IT teams to look at an employee’s electronic communications to define the pieces that could be relevant to a legal case or dispute. …

Email archiving is 20 years old, but there are still companies that are reluctant to adopt it. The rationale is often monetary — for small and medium-sized businesses in unregulated industries, an archive often seems like a costly and inessential project.

Since email archiving is mandated in regulated industries such as healthcare and pharmaceutical, financial, K-12 and higher education, transportation and all levels of government, there is a misconception that it’s only done for compliance purposes. In reality, email archiving benefits go way beyond that.

What is the point of archiving emails?

Email archiving is a process in which every email that circulates through an organization is…

Social media has become the norm in business communication, even in highly regulated industries. And it is recognized by law as official business records, on par with traditional forms of communication such as email.

As a result, social media affects the ediscovery process, as companies need to address another form of communication to collect and preserve data for litigation purposes. That’s why today we look at the intersection of social media and ediscovery and discuss two key challenges: identification and collection, as well as opportunities legal teams should consider.

Impact of Social Media on Ediscovery

There’s a number of reasons why social media is on an…

In today’s digital age, when data privacy laws and compliance regulations are changing fast, enterprise information archiving has become the norm ‒ best practice for some, a regulatory necessity for others.

But what are the digital channels that have to be retained for compliance? Is email dying and, if yes, what is its most likely replacement? If you’re using WhatsApp to communicate with colleagues and customers, can your legal team request that it be archived? What’s the biggest fine ever levied for non-compliance? How much does an average data breach cost a company?

This article will answer these and many…

Having an effective ediscovery system in place is a saving grace for many companies, especially in cases of litigation and maintaining compliance to various federal and industry email retention laws and electronic data retention best practices.

A Few Words About Email Quotas

Email quotas are common in business. They’re used to manage the amount of data each employee uses for their email and to control email archiving requirements. Anyone who has worked for a large organization will be aware of them and will know the pain of skimming your inbox looking for things to delete.

Still, quotas go hand in hand with problems, because the management…