We’ve all heard of company policies. They are procedures that establish the rules of conduct within an organization and outline responsibilities of both employees and employers. Some of these policies deal with the adherence to various state and industry-specific laws and regulations which include FOIA, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, HIPAA etc. They must be put in place in order to protect businesses from penalties and fines which can sometimes amount to millions of dollars and which can wreck the reputation a business has been building for years or decades.
What are email retention policies?
Regardless of the size of your company or the industry it belongs to, it is necessary to track the outbound, inbound and internal communication in your organization in order to keep things under control and ensure compliance. This is done by implementing specific email retention policies ‒ policies which govern which types of digital communication will be retained and for how long. But keeping millions of company email messages in check might seem next to impossible.
Not necessarily so.
Why automate?
An email archiving solution allows you to bring order to your digital data and helps your organization to stay compliant. Setting up and defining policies in your email archiving software lets you highlight and mark specific emails, social media posts or IM conversations.
If you automate your retention policies using an archiving solution, you will be able to create different rules and policies, set or add criteria regarding retention and then forget about the rest.
Your appliance will automatically retain emails which are matched to a certain policy and notify admins or compliance officers in case a rule is broken. The only thing you really need to do once you set up a new policy or rule is to update it in order for it to reflect the new laws, regulations and best practices.
How exactly does it save me legal trouble?
Typically, compliance officers in any organization have thousands of emails to process or view every day. This cannot be done manually. For instance, they may need to send warning messages to all employees who have used foul language in their communication to colleagues. But how do they know who the culprits are?
Let’s say you want to prevent the use of profanities in your staff’s digital communication. You can simply create a profanity rule and add a few keywords. The appliance will then scan all outgoing and internal messages for keywords and send a report to responsible persons. Compliance officers can then easily identify messages and senders. An employee who is not familiar with the protocol of your organization or chooses to deliberately ignore the rules poses a risk for the entire organization ‒ a scenario which could easily develop into a situation where your organization may face litigation.
Your archiving appliance automatically retains emails and notifies admins in case a rule is broken. Click To TweetWhat happens after the retention period expires?
A retention period is the time that digital communication stays on your archiver. In case a policy is set to last for 7 years, the expunge function makes sure that all emails are automatically deleted immediately after the retention period expires. This is vital for two reasons: you’ll get fresh storage space and, more importantly, it will remove the liability you have over the data you’ve been archiving. Pretty neat, right?
To learn how Jatheon can help you automate rules and policies and keep you fully compliant, schedule a demo today.
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