Email hygiene is no excuse!
For the first time in probably a dozen years, I’m not at SNW this week. Part of me is ecstatic to be home for once and part of me feels like I’m missing the reunion with the gang! My wife’s business travel plans collided with mine for this week giving me the opportunity to stay at home with the kids. I can see some gourmet meals happening this week!
While everyone else is in meetings this week, I thought I’d get caught up with some blogging. I ran across a story last month that I meant to comment on, but never got to it, so now’s my chance. It’s about the email antics associated with Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration. It turns out that even though they were told last year by a judge to stop deleting emails, the practice still continued.
Isn’t it amazing that in this day and age that people still don’t understand the ramifications of deleting emails and destroying evidence? Especially when a judge explicitly tells you not to do so? According to the story at boston.com, Michael J. Kineavy, one of Menino closest aides, was very efficient at keeping his inbox down to a manageable size. Every day he was cleaning up his emails, deleting them, and then emptying the deleted folders. He had been doing this for five years. Turns out he assumed someone or something else was making copies to be saved elsewhere. You know what they say about assuming….
So, who’s to blame? An employee diligently trying to stay within their mailbox storage limits? Or does that happen to be the convenient excuse for deleting tons of email? Well, there’s no excuse for either today! There are many email archiving applications from companies such as: Atempo, Commvault, Mimosa, Symantec, and ZL Technologies, that solve both the mailbox storage management problem as well as the data retention needed for corporate or regulatory compliance. These applications capture the emails and store them so that even if somebody accidentally (or purposely) deleted and email a copy can be kept in the archive.
Permabit offers the most cost-effective (via Dedupe 2.0) and scalable archive for these applications to store the emails (among tons of other data – it’s just a NAS box after all). The added benefit we have in our storage is the ability to create WORM based volumes (this doesn’t cost extra, it’s built right in) to store some or all of the emails. What that means is that nobody can alter or delete those emails until the retention policies expire — in the case of the city of Boston, for two years. So, rather than face steep fines or even prison time, isn’t it about time to put the right tools in place to protect everyone from these types of news stories?