Archiving Today
By Stephanie Jordan
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) govern the conduct of all civil actions brought in the U.S. Federal district courts. Although they have been in place for a long time, recent FRCP amendments came into effect December 1, 2006. The new rules require companies to retain all corporate records, including email and data compilations, and make them available to the court as soon as there is a reasonable expectation that a lawsuit might occur, without the court having to specifically make a discovery request.
"While the procedures and amendments apply to Federal suits, most States are adopting the same standard," says Sundar Raghavan VP of Solutions Marketing for Postini. Companies that do not have a good email archiving policy will not be able to respond in a timely fashion." And being ignorant or unable to produce the required data is not a defense. "There have been a number of instances where the courts have found a negative inference. Meaning, if an organization is unable to produce the requested electronic data, then it is assumed that the organization is hiding something." Especially in cases were it is employee vs. employer—where more often than not, the court will side with the employee.
Given the rapid adoption of email in the last 15 years, it is not surprising that long time rules are being amended to accommodate where information lives today. "Email remains a young application. In a relatively short time it has grown from a basic tool to a mission critical one," comments Paul D'Arcy, VP of marketing for MessageOne. "Today, email is used for everything from executing contracts, to conducting business with customers. Often email is fully integrated into business processes. The result of email maturing is the need to go through all these levels of investment to become a real enterprise application."
As email security technology has evolved to protect against new threats, archiving of email now requires a more sophisticated means of records management. "Today, the archiving market is red hot. Most organizations are thinking about—for the first time ever—what their email retention policy should be, and how they will manage it," says D'Arcy. He goes on to note that one of the strongest trends in the archiving market today is the integration of archiving and disaster recovery. "They are becoming one. The reason for that is when you look at the archiving market, e-Discovery as a problem is similar to disaster recovery. A lot of companies want to solve those problems holistically, not to mention the savings to solving them separately."