Email Archiving for Education

Every educational institution should have a strict e-mail usage policy to protect their students, administrators, supervisors, and teachers. However, just because they have a policy doesn't mean it is being adhered to. Without a way to identify if those policies are being followed, how can you be certain they are protected?

The Issues:
Educational organizations need to protect and manage their reputation or face potential loss of rankings, status, tuition, sponsorships, and government funding.

The risk of offensive content or confidential information being sent by a teacher or administrator is too dangerous. What about the risk of intellectual property being sent outside of the school's domain? There is also the expensive cost to bandwidth and storage for e-mail traffic and attachments.

How can an educational institution claim that a policy protects their constituents or themselves, when there is no effective way of being aware of what is happening with e-mail on a regular basis? What if administrators could track usage and knew that 81% of all e-mails had .jpg attachments, or that 25% of those attachments had the word "sex" as part of the file name or content? If administrators became aware of this, they would want to investigate immediately.

How would a school administrator know how and when a policy breach has taken place? It could be happening every day. How can you address this concern or enforce policies if you don't even know anything is wrong until it's too late?

If an incident does happen that requires legal research, hundreds of hours of e-mail log file evidence discovery can cost tens of thousands of dollars if you had to hire legal forensic specialists.

The MailMeter Solution:
MailMeter automatically captures all emails, internal and external into a fully secured, tamper-proof and searchable archive.

Administrators can drill down into issues and search for specific words, domains, or attachments. Any authorized user can search the message body and even any attachment text.

MailMeter Insight reports give you easy access to seeing all activity from everyone in a department of location.

• Full compliance with all regulations
• Save storage in your e-mail server - faster backups, disaster recovery, and better reliability
• Dramatically reduce costs of legal investigations
• Protect intellectual property
• Reduce organization and executive exposure
• Improve employee education about risky behavior
• Increase integrity of information since transactions cannot be deleted from the archive
• Improve productivity by enforcing the E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy

Important Questions to ask your IT, Legal, and Compliance Officer
As an executive, you should be very concerned at the lack of infrastructure, process and controls for archiving e-mail in your organization. You should ask your management team these important questions. If they cannot answer these questions, you may be placing your company at serious risk.

• What would be the cost or damage if your company had to pay penalty fines, or if you were fined or sanctioned for non-compliance?
• Do you have an E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
• How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
• How many times has an employee e-mailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
• How do you know if employees are e-mailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
• What percentage of your company e-mail is non-work related?
• How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?