Introduction | Side-by-Side Comparison

Digital archiving has traditionally been an IT-driven initiative, intended to address primarily operational issues such as performance, storage and business continuity. However a paradigm shift in archiving has occurred, much of it fuelled by changes in regulations as well as growing case law affecting electronic documents. When regulations began treating e-mail as a business record and instituted mandatory retention requirements and the courts deemed electronic records such as e-mail to be discoverable, admissible evidence, IT departments quickly realized that the issues surrounding the retention of corporate records extended far beyond storage. While traditional archiving solutions can cost effectively handle the ever increasing volume of e-mails and other electronic document types, today’s environment demands more than simply retaining records on secure media:

1. Retention period – length of time a record is useful to the organization and must be retained to comply with regulations. As soon as this period expires, the record should be destroyed to reduce operational costs and limit liability.



2. Legal hold – in the event of actual or pending litigation, records must be placed on legal hold and retention rules automatically overridden to avoid destruction.



3. Trustworthiness – the organization must demonstrate that its records could not be altered or deleted without an evidence trail.



4. Privacy – access to records, particularly personal data, must be thoroughly controlled.



5. Chain of custody – to ensure the fidelity of each record, organizations must be able to audit and prove electronically every interaction with every record: when the record was accessed and by whom.



6. Supervision – the ability to automatically monitor e-mail and instant messaging communication for specific content (i.e. racist, sexually explicity, company confidential information) so appropriate action can be taken.



7. Discovery – the ability to rapidly search through large volumes of disparate content types in response to an audit, legal discovery or other search request.

Traditional archiving systems are simply not equipped to adequately address these issues. They were developed to address storage concerns; not validate compliance and record integrity. Records Compliance Management archival systems, on the other hand, were explicitly developed with storage, compliance and record integrity in mind; not just e-mail, but all types of business records ranging from instant messaging and desktop documents like Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint to print lists, faxes, audio, video and ERP or CRM data.