Your business must comply with internal and local, state and national compliance regulations. This often means creating an email archiving plan in order to you can save important email correspondence and files, and quickly retrieve this information. Before you start archiving your emails, you must create an email archiving plan for both current and future needs.
Email Archiving Plan of Action
You need to take the following steps to institute your email archiving plan.
1. Identify Regulatory Requirements: You need to know what regulatory requirements are necessary for your company, including local, state and federal regulations. This will influence your overall plan.
2. Identify eDiscovery Scenarios: After archiving your emails, you may get requests to quickly find and retrieve records from both inside and outside of your organization. Figure out the type of data that is most likely to be requested.
3. Establish a Retention Policy: You need to figure out how long you want your emails archived. This will depend on your company, industry and regulations. Recommendations include anywhere from three years for educational organizations to as long as five years for corporations. Having a policy in place also protects you if your need to go to court.
4. Involve all Stakeholders: You need buy-in from all the major stakeholders in your organization, including HR, legal, finance, compliance, IT and investor relations. Email archiving affects everyone in the company so you need to know what email program they use, where emails are stored, and how/how often old emails are accessed.
5. Finding an Email Archiving Solution: Shop around for the best solution based on your business requirements. The best solutions are automated solutions. This way, you don’t have to remind employees and contractors to back up their email; the system automatically does it for them.
For more tips on establishing an email archiving plan, click here.
