How Compliant Archiving Would Have Saved the White House from Embarrassment
A recent story on missing emails from the Bush-era administration has been making the rounds. The number is staggering: twenty-two million (!) emails, that were previously described as "lost", have been found.
It turns out that the Bush White House failed to install a properly working electronic recordkeeping system. The messages appear to have been mis-labeled.
Regardless of how you want to spin it (this is not a political blog), the fact is that a proper compliant archiving system in place would have prevented this from ever happening! For compliance, archiving is essential. This is for compliance with regulatory bodies like the SEC and FINRA. But even for practical, non-regulated reasons including:
- Disaster recovery;
- Having a duplicate copy (redundancy);
- Employee monitoring
For the potential savings in the case of a catastrophe, audit or any other situation, looking into a compliant archiving solution could very well save your company money. Do your due diligence and find out if it’s something your company needs. Hopefully your company isn’t the next to have the headline "22 Million E-Mails Found."
Innovations & Trends in Compliant Archiving
According to many experts, maintaining compliant archiving for e-mail is a major challenge. For example, a variety of different compliance regulations often apply, which means that different policies must be followed, depending on the type of data. In response, an increasing number of organizations are using archiving products that deliver automated e-mail retention. In addition, some organizations choose to save all of their data rather than struggling to determine what should be stored.
Compliance Archiving Options
Once you’ve decided to develop a compliant archiving strategy for your organization, the next challenge is deciding which type of solution to choose. Storage tools range from the old school method of tape backups to more advanced solutions like application-aware archiving software and even full blown content management systems. The type of compliant archiving system to choose depends on an organization’s data type as well as their business requirements.
Generally, to satisfy upcoming regulations, it would be wise to stay away from an outdated method of keeping track of data and research the new and fully compliant programs and systems out there. This can save you the time and cost of having to upgrade in the very near future.
Compliant Archiving Issues To Contend With
Compliant archiving, which is also known as compliance archiving, is most effective when conducted as part of a smart data management strategy so that it maintains easy and affordable access to stored data. It is also important to take steps to avoid embarrassing and costly incidents involving massive data loss that have damaged the reputation and bottom line of many organizations. In addition, failure to archive data on specific forms of media could be in violation of compliance statute. Therefore, companies must carefully choose their archiving options in order to ensure that they are fully compliant. Because when it comes to compliance, archiving is absolutely necessary.
Compliance Archiving Options
The most appropriate archiving tools for any organization are largely based on the type of data they are archiving as well as their business needs. It is important to note that there are both technological and procedural aspects to maintaining compliant archiving. Experts also say that the establishment of a compliant archiving policy should be put in place before the technology or services are purchased.
What Is Compliant Archiving?
An archive is a collection of organizational records that have been created during the course of time and have been stored for permanent or long-term preservation. Such data is accessed infrequently and its content does not change. Companies must preserve it, however, for a various reasons, including system failure or disaster recovery. A great deal of archiving is done out of necessity to meet a wide variety of government regulations, from the SEC, FINRA and FRCP to HIPAA and SOX. This type of central preservation is referred to as compliant archiving.
Companies facing compliance regulations have a variety of archiving products to choose from. The challenge is to find the solution that best suits your organization. Regardless of the specific need, combining software and hardware with a thoughtful retention policy for archiving is vital for industries that face compliance regulations.
A good archiving strategy can actually reduce the overall cost of storing data. Compliant archiving should do all of the following:
- Protect archived data from those not authorized to view it;
- Make it easily accessible for those with permission to do so;
- Include disaster recovery plans.
Beyond being compliant, cost-effective archiving strategies also include the following elements:
- Offer reliability, availability, connectivity and serviceability features that enable effective information life-cycle management;
- Enable quick and affordable archiving capacity increases;
- Minimize power and data center rack usage.
Because of the complexity and mission-critical nature of the data, it is vital to find a reliable archiving partner for your compliant needs. Do the research and choose wisely.
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