Email Archiving for Government and Public Works

The Issues:
Policy and the enforcement of policies are important needs for every government and public sector organization. They should have a strict E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy, which they feel protects their staff, administrators and constituents. But, just because they have a policy doesn't mean it's being adhered to.

What if administrators knew that 61% of all their inbound e-mails had .jpg attachments, or that 25% of those attachments had the word "sex” as part of the file name or content? Administrators would surely want to investigate, but they have not even been aware that it has been happening. How can an administrator address this concern or enforce policies if he doesn't even know anything is wrong?

Regulation compliance and governance are needs that every government and public sector organization must ensure. The ability to maintain accurate reocrds that provide quick and accurate searching are mandated.

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

Employee productivity and cost savings are very important to budget conscious administrators. The problem is that employees know their e-mail behavior is buried beneath a mountain of data, and they have a feeling of relative anonymity. This leads to a very real possibility that some employees accidentally or intentionally misuse the e-mail system, ranging from sending dozens of e-mail each day to friends or family to intentionally abusing the system by sending out offensive spam from their e-mail account.

The MailMeter Solution:
MailMeter captures all e-mail into a secured, tamper-proof archive to meet any regulatory requirement.

With MailMeter, administrators can drill down into issues and search for specific words, domains, or attachments. Any authorized user can search the message body and even the attachment text in minutes.

Managers can see the effects of changes to policies, enforce policies, and show to auditors that their processes are in compliance.

• 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?