WEI-Tek Consulting, LLC

• Regulatory compliance
• Litigation and Legal Discovery
• Email backup and disaster recovery
• Messaging system & storage optimization
• Monitoring of internal and external email content (Email retention policy)

As industry and government alike grow continually more reliant on information system, particularly email, these information become more valuable. To protect this valuable information, standards and government regulations have been enacted that require certain retention and timely response to legal and information queries. A proper email archiving system allows companies to meet regulatory, and/or business records retention requirements by enabling compliance officers to easily search email stored in the archive and perform periodic reviews.

Several of the primary legal compliance requirements are defined:

• FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)
• Freedom of Information Act
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
• HFTA (Hedge Fund Transparency Act)
• HIPAA
• Investment Advisors Act
• NASD Rule 3110 and NYSE Rule 440
• Sarbanes-Oxley
• SB 1386 (Only in California)
• Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4 and SEC Rule 17a-3
• The USA Patriot Act

For legal discovery, email archiving solutions will lower overall risk of spoliation and greatly speed up the discovery function because of their message indexing, audit capabilities, deduplication and protection of all email messages stored in the archive.[citation needed] For litigation support, email can be retrieved quickly and a history of the email exists to prove its authenticity for chain of custody. For compliance support, email records are stored in the archive according to administrator defined retention policies. When retention periods expire, email is automatically deleted by the archiving application.

Without email archiving, email likely exists on some combination of backup tapes and on end users' local workstations. If a specific email needs to be found for an internal investigation or in response to litigation, it can take weeks to find and costs a great deal. With today's legal discovery rules (see FRCP: https://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/RulesAndPolicies/rules/EDiscovery_w_Notes.pdf) and compliance legislations, it has become necessary for IT departments to centrally manage and archive their organization's email, so email can be searched and found in minutes; not days or weeks.

In order to survive, most enterprises today depend on high volumes of email running efficiently through their systems. Virtually all enterprises require that messaging be a part of the underlying IT infrastructure. Many decision-makers describe systems such as Microsoft's Exchange as the single most important communication and business application within their operation.

In the e-commerce arena, employees must have access to email to close sales and to manage accounts. These types of employees, plus many other types, often want to keep their emails indefinitely, but some organizations mandate that emails more than 90 days old be deleted. Deleting older emails is foolish because the one email that might help a company win a law suit might be nonexistent. Also, any email that is successfully delivered has two copies, the sender and the recipient. Any email sent or received outside the company will probably still exist, even if the company has deleted it on their own side.[citation needed]

Every email message takes up space on a email system's hard drive or some other permanent storage device (e.g. Network Attached Storage, Storage Area Network, etc.). As the size of these messages increase, simple operations such as retrieving, searching, indexing, backup, etc. take utilize more information system resources. At some point older data must be removed from the production email system so that they can maintain a level of performance for their primary use, exchange of email messages. Email archiving solutions improve email server performance and storage efficiency by removing email and attachments from the messaging server based on administrator defined policies. Archived email and attachments remain accessible to end users via the existing email client applications.