Messaging Data Governance

Corporate Messaging

For most organizations, email messaging is the primary means of communication and sharing corporate information.

Challenges of exploding volumes of email content, spam, and electronic mail abuse, the challenges in email messaging infrastructures are seemgingly insurmountable.

Email governance has raised visibility of this issue, but all too often, resolutions fail to properly define authoritative rules for corporate archiving records. Email etiquette diligence may be high [using quarantines and restricted content lists], however, email retention policies are generally weak, not be properly addressed or understood.

Corporate data governance and compliance initiatives must include email archiving and retention.

Fortunately, regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, may require the retention of email for prescribed periods of time, which may serve to highlight the need for more attention to the issues surrounding email. Unfortunately, with laws differing by state and industry, the compliance complexity is also hightened. This is leading to differing email governance best practices between companies, and with the rate of Mergers and Acquisitions, this spell deep trouble down the line.

Key Issues In Email Governance

The key issues faced by IT managers in email management include:

IT Resource Constraints - desire to reduce resources used to archive and retrieve corporate email
Lack of Knowledge by Business Users - to prioritize and classify their emails using predefined dimensions [user, topic, size, number and types of attachments, etc.]
Lack of Common Classification - many departmental email servers are configured to retain copies of all mail indefinately
Lack of Common Format - system, storage and versioning problems with email residing in different native formats over time.
Ineffective User Achiving Policies - in an attempt to resolve email overload, dedicated delete policy on employee inboxes, places the onus on the user to properly back up and archive their emails and attached records on a "safe and secure" networked storage area. This "managed folders approach" places too much responsibility on the individual email user, leading to mission-critical and sensitive emails being deleted and lost before they can be archived.
Incorrect Email Account Usage - users useing their email account as a virtual file server, never properly storing mail-attached documents in a safe place.
Use of Personal Computers and Mobile Devices - retention concerns become more complicated through difficulty in monitoring and control by IT administrators.
Expanding Messaging Boundaries - enterprise messaging is expanding to include instant messaging and other forms of mobile communication making collaboration, retention policies difficult to enforce.
Lack of Visibility - often the need for expertise in retention and electronic discovery does not arise until an unexpected audit or legal action occurs, exposing inadequate infrastructure to discover or reconstruct information buried within backup tapes, or destroyed.

Messaging Data Governance Solutions

The best email governance technology solutions automatically categorize and organize email into physical/logical folders or classes of compartments. Distributed Web-based applications allow for intuitive keyword searching, quick discovery and indexed retrieval, thereby solving most compliance and regulatory inquiries and dynamic audit events.

Recent advancements in data and network virtualization are also making this easier.

Technology is allowing organsations to reduce the size of their email archives and eliminate redundancies in message content. This has a direct cost reduction in storage management costs.

Like all governance initiatives, the success of gaining control over email, requires a joint effort by both the business and IT to identify responsibilities for content vulnerabilities.

Executive management and legal personnel must attempt to understanding retention technology capabilities.
IT must be able to deliver clear guidance [in business terms] as to what system controls must be implemented per corporate document retention policy.
Employees must become familiar with general email and document retention policies and play their part in compliance to these policies.

Collectively addressing email governance issues and being proactive in addressing retention policies is a major undertaking, and often at the cost of more seemingly strategic technology projects. But reality is, this must occur before a legal action or unauthorized dissemination of classified information occurs. The cost will be a whole lot higher then!!

NEXT: Data Quality