Should you archive email and other content?

At more than one seminar and Webinar on email and content archiving, I have asked the audience four questions:

1) Do you file a tax return with the IRS, Revenue Canada, HM Revenue and Customs, etc.?

2) Do you make a copy of that return?

3) Do you file that copy?

4) After 30 or 60 days, do you remove that copy from your files and shred it?

For everyone who obeys the law, the answers are always Yes, Yes, Yes and No.

However, when it comes to archiving email, the answer to the last question is often Yes. Many IT organizations have a policy of purging email stores after a month or two in order to maintain control of email-related storage. On one level, that's a reasonable policy given that growth in email storage is the leading problem in managing messaging systems we have discovered in numerous surveys over the past three years.

From a legal and regulatory standpoint, however, deleting email after such a short period -- or allowing users only to preserve what they want to keep -- is potentially very dangerous and becoming more so over time. The reasons are simple: a) a great deal of email and other electronic content contain business records; and b) you are required by law, legal precedent and best practice to maintain business records. Deleting these records just because they're stored in email is fundamentally no different than clearing out your filing cabinets every 30 or 60 days simply because they contain paper.

The bottom line is that organizations of every size and in every industry should a) develop detailed records retention policies, b) develop enforcement mechanisms for those policies, and c) deploy systems that will enable a and b. Further, deploying archiving is not a low priority that can get to when economic times are good again -- if you have not yet done so, you need to implement archiving now.