Presentation attended – Symantec with Dennis Prendergast and Ferdie Gomez
With email becoming more and more of a transactional tool between businesses both internal and external there is a real need to secure, archive and add intelligence to our email stores.
An interesting statistic delivered by Symantec is that 75% of Business IP is held in email.
1 in 400 emails is confidential.
So, in your business, what happens when your employee deletes an email from their PST file that is legally meant to be archived for 7-10 years?
Or, what happens when your employee leaves and your IT admin deletes the PST file while cleaning the PC for the next employee?
Lets say that employee forwards confidential information to their own personal mail account, leaves the company and then sues you and you no longer have access to their email store. Legally you could be screwed.
If 75% of your IP is in email then how do you go about adding intelligence to that information and sqeezing value out of that information? Most mail servers in their own right are not that smart when it comes to search, or say gathering information to make strategic decisions. Mail archiving solutions, like Symantec Enterprise Vault, can make a difference here and should also ensure that you never loose an email again. Policies probably need to be in place to ensure that work related emails are never deleted – perhaps move them into another folder.
But then you get the issue with the size of PST files being restricted by IT staff, so as an employee your are actually forced to delete emails and large attachments otherwise you get a message advising you are reaching your mailbox limit.
Coming from a ’store everything’ and index it policy to a situation like you describe, where you get the feeling that email is almost frowned upon, yet it’s the people that keep and archive their ‘knowledge’ that can always pull up a year old email to learn from it.
There should to be an enterprize solution to this, a ‘flag this and make it available to my co-workers’ button, even. For me, Google Desktop indexing my mail, and also every accesible location on the company intranet – instantly makes those tricky question a matter of a quick search. Taking that a step further and classifiying, tagging and partitioning the common knowledge is an important step for an enterprize to progress – rather than losing that knowledge when an employee leaves.