Published: April, 2010
19 pages
Organizations are confused about how long to keep emails. Some delete almost everything after 60 days, in case they are caught as a miscreant during e-discovery. Others keeps everything indefinitely. And many take a middle course. Few are satisfied that their approach is the right one.
This report looks at the current state of email retention policies. It incorporates data from a survey of 22 organizations representing more than 443,000 mailboxes running Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, and other email platforms. It also presents Ferris Research’s interpretation of the findings.
We discuss the key drivers behind the need to establish email retention policies, the policies that respondents have implemented, and the challenges they face in defining and enforcing these policies.
Key findings include the following:
- Litigation holds and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are the largest drivers for retention policies. These are followed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
- Some 14% of the respondents (three of the 22 organizations surveyed) still rely solely on end-user archives such as personal storage tables (PSTs) or GroupWise archives for retention.
- Organizations treat unified messaging (UM) voicemail differently from email. The lack of discoverability is driving some organizations to avoid archiving voicemails.
- Heavily regulated or litigious businesses have the most complex retention policies and, thus, more costly storage and technology investments.
- Less-regulated markets typically adopt simple retention policies, such as 60-, 90-, or 120-day retention schedules managed through quotas and simple spring cleaning mailbox management.
- A dwindling but still significant number of respondents continue to use backups for retention.
2 Comments
What percentage of your respondents used which email platform? Virtually all of your points and comments pertain to Outlook or Groupwise, what about the IBM offering? How does that enable– or not– retention of server-based email and server-based archives?
The idea of server-based archiving being an “emerging technology” as noted in the context of Exchange 2010, completely misses the fact that Lotus Domino and Notes have supported that capability for many, many years, and those capabilities have been expanded in the past few years to essentially allow businesses to force automated, server-based archiving.
Dan,
The survey reflects the market in general, so it’s heavily Exchange-biased. I think its findings are generally relevant to Notes users.
–David