What Banks Don’t Know About E-mail Archiving Can Hurt Them
Turn Down the Volume
Each employee at Woodsville Guaranty Savings Bank ($289 million in assets) in Woodsville, N.H., receives between 50 to 100 e-mails each day, and each sends out between 25 to 30, relates Bob Miller, vice president and information systems officer for the bank. And, consistent with the overall average, 80 percent of the e-mail the bank receives is spam, he says.
The most difficult aspect of managing messaging for Woodsville Guaranty Savings Bank to control is storage, according to Miller. "E-mail archiving is the buzz topic right now," he says. "Regulators want it. Legal wants it. It's a case of the pen is mightier than the sword."
Archiving e-mail involves automatically placing e-mail-based records into secure archival storage where they can be easily retrieved. Although e-mail archiving is a top-of-mind concern for many banks, there are financial institutions that still are indifferent to the requirement, says Richard Purdy, global financial services marketing and solutions development leader for EMC Corp., a Hopkinton, Mass.-based provider of products, services and solutions for information management and storage.
Organizations mistakenly think that if they back up e-mail, then they're accountable for it, and if they don't, then that information can't incriminate them, explains Purdy. But that is just not the case, he stresses, pointing to recent litigation as prime examples of companies that already have been hurt by what they don't have.
If effective message archiving isn't on the mind of bank executives, it should be, adds Woodsville's Miller. "We are probably one of the few banks in our area that are [using archiving] right now," he says. Other banks in the area -- apart from the largest national and regional financial institutions -- still are using tapes, he contends. In fact, according to a September white paper from Black Diamond, Wash.-based Osterman Research, most organizations don't archive their e-mail, instead relying on backup tapes to preserve data.
With such outdated methods, trying to retrieve just one e-mail could take a couple of hours compared to less than one minute with Woodsville's archiving system, which is hosted by Norwalk, Conn.-based managed e-mail-archiving provider Fortiva, Miller says. That's not something that will fly when litigation calls for information to be discovered in a timely matter.
"Judges are increasingly disinclined to be lenient for bad information management," Gartner's Logan asserts, adding that at least three-fourths of all companies will be involved in legal action that will require a systematic approach to legal discovery. "You will need to be proactive about getting this stuff together for the judge," she says. In fact, 24 percent of organizations have had employee e-mail subpoenaed, and 15 percent of companies have gone to court to battle lawsuits triggered by employee e-mail, according to a July survey from the American Management Association (New York).
However, according to Logan, "There isn't a corporation in the U.S. -- or in the world for that matter -- that has an effective records-retention policy across the board."
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