Next steps for e-mail administrators if your company is hit with a subpoena

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
08/11/05
Today's focus: Next steps for e-mail administrators if your
company is hit with a subpoena

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* E-mail search, discovery and forensics
* Links related to Storage in the Enterprise
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Next steps for e-mail administrators if your
company is hit with a subpoena

By Mike Karp

"Greed is good," said Gordon Gecko in the movie "Wall Street."
Unless, of course you get caught.

Today, we continue with our look at e-mail archiving issues.
Last time, we covered retention and disposition. Today the topic
is archiving as it pertains to search, discovery and forensics
analysis.

In compliance-speak, the term "search, discovery and forensics"
refers to a system's ability to perform legal discovery
requests. This should extend across all the e-mail assets -
online, near-line and off-line. Things have to be findable no
matter where they may reside.

Since 2002, financial officers of publicly held businesses have
been required to sign a code of ethics. According to the
Sarbanes Oxley Act, this includes "such standards as are
reasonably necessary to promote ...honest and ethical conduct,
including the ethical handling of actual or apparent conflicts
of interest between personal and professional relationships;
full, fair, accurate, timely, and understandable disclosure in
the periodic reports required to be filed by the issuer; and
compliance with applicable governmental rules and regulations."
(Have a secret desire to be a lawyer, or just want to see what
your corporate attorneys are concerned about? Sarbanes Oxley is
yours to enjoy at <http://www.sec.gov/about/laws/soa2002.pdf> )

Corporate officers wanting to prove they have been free of
unethical conduct should be well on the way to making sure their
e-mail archives are up to snuff. Those who can't prove they have
been playing by the rules, well... good luck to them.

E-mail is so crucial to business communication these days that
it is always part of the subpoena for business records. If your
company were hit with a subpoena, what would your next step be?
In many cases, it would involve the brute force searching of
hundreds of back-up tapes for old e-mail, a process that is both
time-consuming and costly.

Assume your company is being sued, and your corporate legal
department has asked you to provide all records associated with
a particular business transaction. What would you do? Can you
make even the broadest estimate as to what the cost would be, or
how much time it would take your team to discover what the
appropriate e-mail records were? Would you even know where to
begin?

If you are an e-mail administrator, what you most likely will
want is a system to capture all content in the Outlook (or
Notes) system. This means more than just the messages and their
attachments, it also means capturing the calendar items,
contacts, notes, to-do lists and all the rest of it. Look for an
ability to search intelligently across mailboxes. When it is
time to discover e-mail for investigation, legal support and
regulatory compliance reasons, intelligent searches will be
worth their weight in gold because of the time they save and the
accuracy they can deliver. Be warned however that this means
more than simple searches. To help provide your company's legal
team with a complete analysis of mailboxes for forensics, you
will want a system that can follow or reconstruct complex
message threads.

Of course, the cleverest among you will opt for a system that
allows the users themselves (in this case, the legal department)
do their own searching so you can go about your usual IT
business. Compliance or legal search, discovery and forensics
functions are typically reserved for people within a company who
are specifically tagged with auditing responsibilities.

Some vendors have mentioned to me that the cost of a single
e-mail discovery would pay for an entire e-mail archive
solution. After thinking about the hours involved in the
discovery process, and the financial penalties that lie in wait
for a company that is unable to execute this process accurately
and efficiently, I am starting to believe them.

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. Microsoft open source exec: Not the loneliest guy in Redmond
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage4935>

2. EMC announces surveillance management application
<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/080905-emc.html?t5>

3. DKIM fights phishing and e-mail forgery
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage4936>

4. Microsoft fixes Print Spooler, Plug and Play flaw
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage4937>

5. Sprint, Nextel expect to finish merger Friday
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage4938>
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Mike Karp

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the
methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He
has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and
telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail
<mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com>.
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