Email Archiving: Do You Really Need to Archive Everything?

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” the great retailer John Wanamaker is credited with saying nearly 100 years ago. “The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

IT managers and legal professionals could say the same thing about archiving email. Do you really need to archive everything?

Most regulations do not specify which messages need to be archived. Rather, they state what needs to be retrieved and, in most cases, how quickly they need to be retrieved. While the difference may seem subtle, the cost implications are huge.

Storage vendors add to the problem when they advise companies to archive everything in order to reduce legal liability. They correctly cite examples of significant fines and cases lost after needed email was wrongfully deleted.

On the other hand, if you save what you need to save and organize your archive for fast retrieval, you can reduce both storage and legal costs.

The good news is that cost of magnetic storage has been declining at a rate of 45% per year since 1989. The cost of a terabyte of data, enough storage for 2000 scanned file cabinets, is expected to drop from $420 in 2005 to just $70 in 2008, according to Berghell Associates. Managed storage has already dropped to just 15 cents per gigabyte per month (Amazon’s Simple Storage Service).

On the other hand, legal costs are escalating. When teams of attorneys and litigation support specialists review every email message for a case, the bills can exceed thousands of dollars per hour.

Therefore, while there are easy steps to reduce storage costs will save money, you may want to put the emphasis on more effective email retrieval. Even small improvements in retrieval accuracy may yield significant reductions in legal bills.

Fortunately, there are several meaningful steps you can take. The program involves identifying what must be kept, optimizing the retrieval of the most frequent requests, and determining what can be easily deleted. The steps are as follows:

1. Regulatory Requirements

The first obligation of any email retention schedule is to preserve email as required by government agencies for compliance review or for other regulatory and statutory reasons.

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Email Archiving: Do You Really Need to Archive Everything?

By Roger Matus, Chief Executive, Sean True, Chief Technology and Chuck Ingold, Principal Research Engineer, InBoxer, Inc.

Email Archiving:
Do You Really Need to
Archive Everything?

By Roger Matus, Chief Executive, Sean True, Chief Technology
and Chuck Ingold, Principal Research Engineer, InBoxer, Inc.