The Law Requires Email Archiving
According to industry experts, approximately 90% of the day's business communications are performed via email or by way of unsecured instant messages. Communications including unstructured data can clog up an organizations network bandwidth and take up great amounts of storage space.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
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Sloppy thinking at it's best!
This article is full of misrepresentation and innuendo calculated to push a sales agenda. Any general counsel would throw this author out of his/her office."The data must be produced and thus it must be archived, because that's the law." Try reading all of the Federal Rules. What about safe harbour. What about a 30 day deletion policy. If I get rid of it, I don't have to do squat. What tripe!
Anonymous is Correct
The article vastly overstates the legal requirements. Archiving is NOT required by the federal rules. Yes, there are definitely circumstances under which preservation of relevant email is required because of pending litigation. Yes, archiving may be a prudent policy to comply with all kinds of record retention requirements and business practices. No, archiving is not the law.Nice flames, unfortunately they are a bit misinformed.
The attention grabbing headline can be debated, the article however is correct."Remember, it's the law that any of your electronic records can be requested and must be provided by a court order under the newly updated Federal Rules of Civil Procedure."
Rule 26, 33 and 34.
Archiving is NOT manadatory by law, but you WILL face additional cost and a real possibility of sanctions and even loosing your case (as numerous case law will attest to), if you can not produce relevant ESI when requested by the opposing side and even more so when mandated by court.
30 day retention is fine, if you can institute it for your ENTIRE network.
Most IT departments can NOT guarantee that the data which may be relevant to a case is completely gone from their network once it is deleted from the mail server.
Rule 37 (Safe Harbor), states that you have to prove in court that the data requested is innaccesible and too cost prohibitive.
Of the hundreds of IT Directors, CIO's, and Network Administrators, not a single one was willing to testify in court that they know for a fact that everything that was relevant to a case was completely deleted from the entire network after 30 days.
By law, (Rule 26 again) a company does have to disclose where the relevant data may and does reside.
Unfortunately once an email is delivered or sent, it can reside in multiple locations such as, PST files, Various network drives, Desktops, Non email servers, Back Up tapes, USB's, Etc.
That is why archiving email, the most prevelant form of ESI in a centralized archival solution, is practiced by most of Fortune 500, Federal and State government agencies.