Mimecast : Why You Need Scary Good Archiving

Reducing compliance nightmares, data loss horror stories and other terrifying threats to avoid

Developing a modern archivingstrategyand maintaining compliance can be scary. No doubt, IT departments are increasingly plagued by data growth and service requirements back to internal customerswhile legal and compliance teams struggle with how to best retain, access, discover and supervisecontent in compliance with evolving regulations. Finding differentiation between the sea of vendors and platform approaches can be even more daunting, not to mention the thought of migrating from anaging solution that no longer fits the needs of your business. These challenges are occurring globally and it all can be downright chilling indeed. Consider these nightmare scenarios:

The clock is ticking on an e-discovery request, can you find all emails critical to your case?

An audit is looming, can you prove chain-of-custody with accurate reporting?

Can you quickly and accurately recover email after a malicious attack?

How many hours per week are employees spending just looking for emails?

Let's face it: these scenarios can't happen, and yet they do. However, business depends on email, and email requires a rock-solid archiving solution. According to Contoural, modern archiving and information management strategies engage a number of drivers,including legal and regulatory recordkeeping requirements, stricter privacy rules, increasing threat of breaches and decreasing employee productivity, and disposition.

A modern strategy not only incorporates all of these drivers, but increasingly transforms stand-alone records, privacy and discovery programs into an integrated information governance program. The good news about GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act, Brexit, FOIA, SOX, FINRA and the alphabet soup of other regulations is that they are forcing conversations about good governance as it relates to email and other content types. Companies are realizing that a single common workstream under an information governance program can provide benefits in a number of areas. In the end, these modern approaches not only increase compliance, but markedly reduce costs, reduce risks and drive productivity.

With this in mind, how can organizations avoid nightmare scenarios?

1. Don't skimp on modern, compliant records retention schedules.Get consensus from key stakeholders on what should be saved, for how long, and what should be deleted after a set amount of time. These schedules should be easy for employees to use.
2. Effectively classify data security. Develop a detailed analysis of PII information flow, and use that information to determine moving information from unmanaged and unsecure repositories towards managed and secure repositories. In addition, organizations mustimplement controls (as noted above)to adhere to retention protocols.
3. Drive employee productivity. When processes are modernized and employees spend less time on admin tasks like personal email management, productivity tends to spikeintandem. For example, giving full search capability, making it easier to share content, and following a seamless organization system are all ways to see success with improved archiving.

There areproblems with legacy archive solutions. From administrative complexity, lack of scalability, and slow search performance, there are significant roadblocks to getting the most out of archiving.

Dustoff the old, on‐premises, IT focused archives and look at challenges in a more forward‐thinking way. This means moving beyond simply managing storage or playing defense in compliance-driven solutions and instead, turning the archive into a digital memory to bring greater business value and smarter decision making. Now that's scary good.

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