I think Ratcliffe is right on. There is a fine difference between the use of personal records and public records. Electronically stored information (ESI) which relates directly to the President and his job as head of the United States, is PUBLIC information. I am sure there are limited exceptions and so on and so forth, but his "personal stuff," the way he phrased it, is not at all accurate. Email archiving solutions, especially in the case of political activity, are truly important measures to have in place to make sure that there is nothing going on that shouldn't be. Governot Matt Blunt of Missouri has made the news recently in EXACTLY the same way. I agree with Ratcliffe that we cannot let this kind of activity slide. It is time that email archiving be taken seriously.

What goes on behind the scenes really is amazing sometimes, even though this situation has been in the making for many years. How did it not go public that the file directories used to store the retained email were accessible by everyone on the EOP network in 2005? Roles based permission access is a serious facet of any quality email archiving solution, especially in our nations highest political facility. How could the white house just refuse so many warnings and requests to update their system? How could the president just disregard laws that COMPEL him to archive email? Perhaps the best quote is right here: Stephen McDevitt, an official in the presidential CIO office, "told the committee that a new e-mail archiving system that would have addressed the problems was ready to go live on Aug. 21, 2006. But CIO Theresa Payton canceled the new system in 2006, because it would have required modifications and additional spending." What? It was canceled for modifications and additional spending? Email archiving is a critical item for the president that is necessitated by law. It is nothing short of wild that Payton gave modifications and additional spending as a reason against its implementation.

At least in terms of electronic communication, it might be time for some hospitals to turn to outsourced email archiving.  Encryption, security, and access are all issues for health care providers right now, and these are three issues that email archiving services are well equipped to handle. It is time for hospitals to address the quality and success of their electronic patient data backup and protection.  With HIPAA security audits right around the corner, the time to wait before integrating an email compliance solution is really over.

Even though I probably shouldn't, I still find it fairly remarkable that the White House simply cannot respond about the whereabouts of many missing emails. With the advent of internet technology there seems to be this general attitude that electronic communication does not have to be held up to the same standard as traditional paper documents. Many corporate executives and government officials seem to think they can pretend conversations never happened by simply deleting email backup tapes. In theory paper copies could just be burned up, but it seems that the ease of conveniently "losing" emails is what makes it so much more noticeable. It does not require a lot to act as if nothing ever happened. However, with industry regulations and legal expectations tightening the grip on corporate behavior, abusing the age of email messaging is only going to get harder to do. It is high time for all organizations to integrate an email archiving solution, especially when the center of the American universe is being thrown into the grand spotlight for this exact reason.

There are a couple of points I would like to make here. Firstly, there has been a recent surge in the amount of educational resources regarding eDiscovery and email archiving. Within the past month alone I have written about professional research papers, legal guidelines, reports, conferences, and even a judicially acclaimed reference on the topic. What is the significance here? I believe that both industry leaders and experts are finally recognizing the sheer volume of companies that are simply unprepared to deal with the pressures of satisfying an ever strengthening corporate & legal governance. Education and integration of email archiving solutions will continue to be a process, but there is little doubt that progress is being made. Secondly, the geography of email archiving and the locations that might be subject to email compliance regulations in the near future will be interesting to keep an eye on. That this seminar is taking place on the Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory, is a sign of society and corporate governance moving in a specific direction.

In one word, the answer is trust. Companies simply do not feel comfortable trusting an outsourced email archiving service to sift through their email and have access to private information. But is that really what happens? Do email archiving services take such advantage of their clients? No, they don't. Why not, you might ask? Roles based permission access, industry regulation authorities, and business reputation are three critical factors that ensure outsourced email archiving safety. Are there any distinct advantages to an in-house email archiving solution that would justify the high cost to maintain and integrate? There are some loose arguments to be made in favor of an in-house solution, but stay tuned for part II for more information.

Duffet mentioned the presence of several significant eDiscovery figures including: attorney Marie Lona, partner and chair of the e-discovery and electronic information practice group at Winston and Strawn, Tom Hall, managing attorney for discovery and litigation technology at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Mikki Tomlinson, litigation support manager for Chesapeake Energy Corp, and moderator Kelli Brooks, principal of forensic technology services at KPMG. Tom Hall discussed the serious sanction handed down in the Qualcomm Inc v. Broadcom Corp by saying "My risk aversion advice: Don't do that."

EDD (electronic data discovery), as evident by the 46,000 missing electronic documents in Qualcomm, is an extremely important business continuity measure in the year 2008. Panel discussions such as the one above are instrumental in the education process for U.S. Businesses to learn about the dangers of avoiding email compliance and email archiving solutions. Perhaps the question is: is it better to retain electronic correspondences using in-house or outsourced solutions? This depends largely on the finances of a company, but there is a strong argument to be made for an outsourced service. They are generally more cost efficient, provide IT relief, and automatically provide you with regulatory and legal compliance.

The study includes the following factors as significant reasons to implement an email archiving solution:

Regulatory compliance. Industries that are heavily regulated, such as financial services or health care companies, must meet a variety of statutory requirements with regard to records retention.

Legal compliance. Dec 2006 revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require organizations to manage their data in such away that it can be produced in a timely and complete manner when necessary, such as during legal discovery proceedings.

Reducing the impact of storage. Roughly 60% of decision-makers cite growth in messaging storage as a serious or very serious problem. Messaging storage, driven by increasing use of e-mail, larger attachments and the like, is growing at an average of 35% annually. By migrating data from storage on messaging servers to archival storage, companies overall storage costs can be reduced, while improving their messaging server performance and expediting recovery from downtime incidents.

My thoughts: at this point there is certainly no shortage of reasons to archive email. This white paper only highlights the list of issues facing both enterprises and businesses in relation to integrating an email compliance solution. With HIPAA, SOX, GLB, NYSE, NASD, AND SEC laws firmly in place, the monitoring and enforcement of corporate email retention is a top priority for U.S. industry regulators. FRCP eDiscovery proceedings have only placed the necessity to archive email on a grander scale, as harsh sanctions and criminal prosecution are legitimate possibilities facing those companies who cannot produce email evidence in a timely fashion. Additionally, the strain placed on an in-house server to retain the thousands upon thousands of in-coming and out-going emails that are accumulated daily has also enhanced the attraction of outsourcing an email archiving service.

HOWEVER, is this really what will get the corporate world to archive their email? I think that Osterman Research has done a great job, but I think that the benefits to email archiving are out there and have been out there. With so many laws, requirements, and IT concerns already established will a new white paper citing what is already known really make a difference? For some it might, but for many it wont. In a recent series of posts about Email Insurance I said that cost, complexity, satisfaction with email backups, apprehension about an unfamiliar corporate practice, and professional disinterest were big reasons why email archiving has not risen to the top of the business agenda. What the U.S. business world needs is the following three factors to help push email archiving into the corporate spotlight: Education. Momentum. Trust. I want to elaborate much more on these three factors in subsequent blog entries but for now I am going to focus on education.

"A Guide to Messaging Archiving" sounds like a nice tool for a CEO or CIO willing to invest the time to learn about email archiving, but will they? Who reads white papers? White papers are academic endeavors designed to provide a degree of expertise in a given topic. Most business professionals are simply too busy to be bothered with reading a white paper no matter how beneficial it might be for their business operation. This seems a strange scenario. People are taking the time to draft comprehensive analyses of important topics and nobody is reading them? I wouldn't say nobody here, but unless someone is seriously considering a purchase it is not a common phenomenon. How can education about corporate email archiving become more appealing? How do you make people WANT to get what they SHOULD get in the first place? I believe this is where attorneys come in. I believe this is where the news comes in. I believe this is where word of mouth comes in. Sometimes it depends on WHO is doing the educating. Might a white paper be more informative then listening to an attorney speak? Sure. Might it not? Sure. That is up to the individual person doing the listening. But what I do know is that hearing what you need to do from someone that you perceive to be in the right position to make a judgment call will win over reading a white paper almost every time. Our society is governed by law. People trust the law. U.S. Businesses trust the legal practitioners that represent the law. If email archiving is to be taken seriously it must come at least partially come from attorneys.

Is there something wrong with a new white paper on email archiving by Osterman Research? There is nothing WRONG in the traditional sense, but I feel that corporate America is just waiting a different form of education, one that they feel more comfortable with. When is this change coming? Is this change coming? I would like to do some more writing on these issues soon. Stay tuned.

Mata wrote: "I must take issue with the comment that the sheriff overnight erases thousands of e-mails all on his departments computers without warning. In actuality, I moved 5 1/2 months worth of e-mail from nearly 4,000 mailboxes onto archive tape. At no time were e-mails erased from computers as Casey asserts, and all of these e-mail messages, attachments included, are recoverable. It must also be noted that no investigative information has been lost, as suggested by some deputies, and the deputies who have made such suggestions are not assigned to investigative functions.

Casey was correct in his statement that the users were given no warning. Let me explain why. As our public information officer, Capt. John Martin, has stated to the media on numerous occasions, we have a critical storage problem on our servers. If I had taken the time towarn our users, they would have off-loaded their email from the mail servers to our file servers. As both mail and file operations are served by the same storage system, there was insufficient storage to allow this. The storage system, placed into operation in March 2006, was sized to serve us for approximately two years before needing an expansion."

My thoughts: Why couldn't the sheriff respond himself? This is the first problem I have with Mata's letter to Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle. This might have been taken more seriously if it appeared legitimate. Secondly, if there really is an email archiving system in place, why has there been no mention of it before? Lastly, was it really necessary for the sheriff to keep all of his users in the dark about what was going on? Was it worth all of the bad press? There might indeed be a critical storage problem in the sheriff's department, but this was handled terribly. I think Charles Kuffner summed this situation up best on his website, and I am going to post what he wrote here:

"If Sgt. Newby is typical, then the users didn't understand what was happening. And I suspect he was typical, because as Mark Bennet shows, the memo and accompanying information (both PDF's) that Sgt. Newby and his coworkers would have received makes no mention of moving emails to archive tape, where presumably it can be retrieved as needed. It baldly says: 'Please consider this memorandum as authorization for the immediate deletion of all departmental email that is, as of the date of this menorandum, older than 14 days.' There may have been some confusion here about what the sheriff's office was doing, but I don't think it was Rick Casey who was the cause of it."

Backing up data is an important business continuity measure against something like a failed hard disk. If such an event were to occur, email backup can be used to restore the most current condition of a hard drive. This can be done in a relatively short amount of time and afford a business the opportunity to get back to normal quickly. But using email backup to preserve data is another matter entirely. The more critical the role that email plays in everyday business, the more stringent the protective measures that need to be in place to ensure preservation. Email backup technology that is widely in use today cannot guarantee that email will remain in its authentic form. This means that a message can be removed from an email backup tape, altered, and restored to the same location from where it was received with little or no notice. And how do you prove it is the original message that is in question, especially when that is in dispute? Even forensics have trouble answering that one. Moreover, the data on an email backup tape is not permanent. It can be overwritten, which sometimes happens when trying to control cost and manage tape rotations. Once the tape is overwritten you effectively remove previously recorded data.

The best way to protect against lost, altered, and unauthorized access to email is by using a message archiving system. One whose sole responsibility is to serialize each incoming and outgoing message, protect against deletion, alteration, and limit access to only authorized individuals. An effective message archiving system uses a medium that is similar in efficiency to disk technology, but with a combination of email security measures that ensures the integrity of the data stored will never be compromised.