Archive for category Email Compliance

Email Compliance – Are You Ready for It?

Email Compliance – Are You Ready for It?

Most business today is conducted by email, including sending important and sometimes confidential messages. According to Osterman Research, email contains approximately 75 percent of the information used by an organization’s individuals on a daily basis. With so much information going around the world every day, many companies often ignore regulatory compliance. Email compliance regulations and laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures, have forced organizations to know more about the information stored in their systems than ever before. Email today contains a host of valuable and highly sensitive information that needs to be stored, retrieved and viewed on demand.

Conserving email has been made mandatory, thanks to the various regulatory compliance and legal risk management regulations that govern every country. It is top priority for IT managers today due to regulatory obligations and harsh penalties along with the prospect of enormous civil damages and even criminal prosecution. An email archiving solution is mission-critical to satisfying these obligations. Having regulations policies in place can save your company significant hassle and protect it from the financial implications of non-compliance.

This article provides simple steps to secure your email archiving system to meet compliance and protect yourself from potential litigation and at the same time provide you with some user benefits.

Email Management – There should clear cut guidelines and rules set with regards to the usage of email. There should be a check on the kinds of emails being sent and received, especially messages going out from the organization as they might contain information that should not leave the corporate walls or malicious information that could harm the receiver. Proper scanning mechanisms should be in place.

Secure Information Sharing – Security of information in the corporate system is very important. What you share with your partners or vendors needs to be secure as the information could be misused. Such messages should be properly encrypted so that no one else can have access to it. Keep track of who has access to what information. How centralized is the information? What format is it in? All this needs to be in order.

Educate Your Workforce – When it comes to compliance and security, it is best to educate your staff regarding email security and why it is important.

Centralized Decision Making – Users should not make important decisions pertaining to enterprise security. Important data should be handled centrally.

Evaluate and Improve Security Policies – Do you cut off physical and online access to your server once an employee resigns? Is personal information that you send over the internet encrypted? Is your online information secure?

The management of an organization is responsible for ensuring that emails are handled in compliance with applicable laws, regulations and frameworks of best practice. Non-compliance not only can lead to fines and criminal prosecution but can also ruin an organization’s reputation. Email encryption, together with content monitoring and control technology, can provide complete email compliance protection.

Writing article is my hobby..


Article from articlesbase.com

Related Email Compliance Articles

Tags: , ,

The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

The Benefits of Email Compliance in a Business

Email has become the standard method of correspondence used by businesses sending important and sometimes confidential messages. Such sensitive information needs to be archived for possible future use in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, specific regulations as well as the company’s email compliance policies.
Email correspondence is used for both internal and external affairs therefore it is important that a copy of all emails is archived for possible future needs relating to legal, compliance and human resource issues. A company must also be in a position to respond to eDiscovery requests at short notice.
Why a company needs email archiving
Existing regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the FRCP treat emails as being equal to paper-based documents in terms of valid and legal documentation presented in a court of law and are therefore admissible during an eDiscovery request.
eDiscovery is the process of locating, securing and using documentation from a company’s archives in a legal setting, so a company must have the ability to procure the necessary documents with the confirmation that these have not been tampered with. Failure to abide by procedures could result in court fines and other financial burdens, as well as a failing reputation.
How email archiving should be implemented
For security, maintenance and resource reasons, email archives should not be archived on the mail server but should have their own localized server that is specific to the task.
Having your emails archived on a separate database ensures more protection for the archives should the server crash, as well as lightening the load on the server. When archiving is another process that the email server is meant to handle, its resources are being stretched to capacity risking poor performance in both tasks. A dedicated email server and a dedicated archiving server render the upkeep of both machines a simpler and cleaner process.
Moreover, separate backups of both servers ensure a safer environment, as by having the archived emails on a separate server, should the email server crash all is not lost since the archived emails would be accessible and easily recoverable meaning that work can be resumed from a certain point.
Email archiving compliance
In industries and countries where regulations require organizations to monitor user activity and keep audit trails, a system that records, logs and retains a database of user activity, or other secure methods such as encryption will ensure that emails have not been tampered with as this would render them inadmissible in a court of law. An auditing facility is also important for compliance purposes.
Log files and counts must prove that all emails (including their attachments) are being captured and can be searched for, found and viewed in their original format. Advising users that their emails are being recorded and archived will act as a deterrent to any abuse of the system.
Email archiving is becoming a standard practice in today’s businesses as the implementation of a successful email compliance policy could save a company a lot of time, money and resources, and provide guarantees that it is in a position to respond to eDiscovery processes and fulfil the requirements of compliance regulation which the company must adhere to.

Jesmond Darmanin is a freelance writer who is passionate about business IT issues and recommends the use of email archiving software for email compliance and eDiscovery requirements.

Related Email Compliance Articles

Tags: , , ,