How not to manage your email archive

Whether your email archive is on-premise or in the cloud, here's just 5 sound pieces of advice from the Essential archiving team on what IT departments should not do when managing their email archives. 

 

1. Take on the full responsibility of defining and managing retention policies

Defining email records management policy should not be solely an IT function.  The setting of your email retention policy should involve the legal and records management department, HR, and other business stakeholders.  Policies should be appropriate, defensible and consistently applied.  The deletion of data should not be driven by ad-hoc requests that fall outside of the stated policy - even where requested by a senior member of staff.  Likewise the deletion of data should not be driven by ad-hoc ‘operational’ needs (e.g. having a spring-clean before migrating to a new version of Exchange or ‘the cloud’ to minimise the amount of data to be moved).  Having said this we frequently see retention policies that are devised to save costs on storage.  Even if you don't have a specific legislative or business remit to retain certain types of emails for a given time, it's always worth ensuring that your HR/legal teams are in agreement with such policies before executing an irreversible change.

 2. Err on the side of caution

In our experience many organisations either leave their retention dates ‘open ended’, or if they do set deletion dates, they don’t actually ‘press the button’ (many archiving solutions require manual confirmation by an administrator).

4 ways to save money preserving Leavers' mailboxes

Andy Knight, Essential

With nearly every migration workshop I attend now the same question comes up: “What do I do about my leavers”?

It’s inevitable people will leave your company, but the hard decision for a lot of companies comes when a migration is planned to a new version of Exchange or a new archive solution and whether those 'dead' archives/mailboxes should be moved.

For some it's a 'no brainer' - if there's a compliance need then all data needs to be retained but for others it's a 'nice to have', the problem comes then with cost: paying for a mailbox/archive licence in the new environment for staff that left a long time ago can be hard to swallow as most migrations are there to save money and improve working practices.  Over the years the number of leavers mailboxes you need to maintain can mount up too.

So what can you do? If you’re lucky enough the target archive won't charge you for inactive mailboxes.  However where there are licence costs associated with these mailboxes/archives (such as with Office 365 and Exchange 2010 personal archives) you may want to look at alternatives.  Here are just a few ideas:

Fallacy: An archive does not allow you to permanently delete an email

I read with interest a recent Mimecast blog which refers to a TechCrunch article on the News Corporation phone hacking scandal. The archiving vendor  alludes to the concept of an email archive making it possible to permanently delete an email from circulation. 

Deleted Email - A myth?

We’ve all done it; composed an email, hit send, then regretted it.

The heart-rate goes up and we become people of action, trying in vain to recall it. Invariably it's too late and we just have to accept the consequences.

The problem is that if we want to delete an email, making sure both the deleted items and the recycle bin is emptied will not cover our tracks. Even if it’s been purged from the Exchange server dumpster, that’s not the end of the story.