Rating: +0
Is the email moved out of the email system; is a separate system set-up; or is every email being journaled indefinitely? Additionally, are others disallowing POP and other types of access that permit mail from being moved outside of organization email system?
Brenda,
Firms have installed archival technology for this purpose. The archive contains the copy of authentic records for legal discovery and long-term records management.
Most archival systems have sophisticated retention management and disposition capabilities to categorize records and apply retention rules which are mapped to corporate records file plans which should include physical migrations (as part of the file plan) to move records to lower cost media over time.
The storage caveat specific to the financial services industry is the requirement for WORM, most firms utilize electronic worm capabilities today, vs. optical *from just a few short years back*. Most permanence on disk allows retention periods to be set and extended but never shortened. This allows for extending retention periods in the event of legal holds.
On the POP questions, most companies turn off POP access due protocol to security vs. "guarding" the email, it’s nearly impossible to prevent that type of leakage (file, print) (print screen), etc.
In an Exchange environment, Journaling is the recommended vendor (Microsoft) method for harvesting emails, and the archival systems would harvest messages from the Journaled mailbox(s). Real-time integration with directory sources such as Active Directory is performed for unwinding distribution list and dealing with security access. Full text indexing is common as well as Google like search facilities.
The better vendors have everything organic as part of a single solution, vs. a hodge-podge of different vendor technologies brought together. The organic approach is critical if you have records that have to be kept for the long-term, anything over 15 years is the de-facto for "long-term". With to many COTS software pieces it would be a safe bet that 15-20 years from now your records would be prone to the inability to access the content.
Legal Discovery also added a new dimension to what was purely archival and compliance. The case management aspects of archival systems have to account for preserving provenance to assist in proving authenticity, and support system meta-data for logical migrations and a variety of other system tasks.
All in all, it is under-control or at least can be, sufficient commercial technology exists today to provide reliable long-term archival for legal discovery, compliance and storage management. Vendors like my firm (AXS-One) solve these concerns on a regular basis.
Good Luck,
Peter
August 2008