(CSI1000) Compliance Weblog

Deleting e-Mails From Your Archive

To delete or not to delete, this now appears to be one of the holy grails of the e-mail archival industry, and it’s extending beyond regulated industries. On the surface, you would think that the regulatory industry is the best suited for deleting e-mails as the regulations are very specific for how long particular e-mails have to be kept. What more could you ask for, you have it in black in white, from the government in a loud booming voice "thou shall keep the Equity traders e-mails for a period of 5 years, thou shall only delete it after the prescribed period has come and gone".

So what’s the issue with deleting that e-mail on it’s 5 year anniversay date? With today’s systems you can schedule the deletion for the exact second it reaches it’s 5 year anniversay.   So again, what’s the big deal, well let’s take a look at look at it from the opposite perspective. 

Outsourcing message to a CIO friend of mine

Like most of you I spend a lot of my time on airplanes reading and writing e-mails. On a recent flight I decided this would be worth posting and sharing. It's an email communication with a friend of mine who I met with earlier in the day. He's a CIO at one of the largest banks in the US. Our meeting was to discuss his banks storage dilemmas and how his normal IT operations were being frustrated and quite frankly confused with the heightened awareness around regulatory compliance.  He and I grew up in the IT industry together, so our meeting and conversations are pretty casual.

After our meeting I told him that it sounded like his dilemma was keeping him up at night, he concurred, and offered that 'it's just not as easy as 'writing a program' like the old days' to solve a business problem, that the issues of 'business risk' is daunting for both him and his IT managers and it does in fact 'keep him up at night'.

As a friend and trusted confidant I told him that I would try to help him with his 'sleep' problem.

Anyhow, moving on, when the plane hit 10,000' and the familiar bell tolled I reached for my notebook and started jotting him a note. An excerpt from my note to him follows.

e-Mail to a Large U.S. Bank Corporate CIO.

Excerpt begins here...

Correct and Complete Data Archival

When we are going down the road of e-mail archiving for regulatory reasons is there a thing as 100% complete, or is 5 - 9’s accuracy good enough?

What is the consequence for correct and complete as it relates to data archival systems deployed for compliance, legal discovery and ultimately corporate risk management.

If you are challenged with the requirement for capturing all electronic communications (inbound/outbound) what mechanism, process or IT controls can help you to achieve 100% accuracy or better put - can guarantee both complete and correct results? Even in the best case scenario can you ever really account for technology outages, software bugs (that can occur at every layer below the application, firmware for example on a hardware device), or even good old fashion human error. Although the vision of an archival system gives you the impression that you are dealing with a very static durable almost simple piece of technology that houses long-term data - nothing could be further from the truth.

Upfront Considerations for E-Mail Archival

E-Mail archival has taking several twists and turns over the last few years.

The primary one is the use of the archive for legal discovery, sometimes referred to as eDiscovery.

This has left many vendors flat footed and the reasons are in fact quite simple.

Tape Restoration and E-Mail Archival

Depending on the industry and the typical damage periods (i.e. Anti-Trust where the damage period can go back 10-15 years on averge) most of the data needed for responding to legal discovery will reside on tape.  So if you’ve recently implemented an archival strategy for capturing e-mails, where you can use the system for legal discovery, you may still need to deal with tape restores for quite some time, years even.

It’s prudent to consider tape restoration to the archive as part of your implementation and strategy upfront.

About the picture. PowderHorn 9310 tape library