I have just been reading the interesting article “Microsoft calls E-discovery, Records Management Inseparable halves”. Microsoft is likely to understand this more than most with the amount of litigation cases it gets involved in each year. Over the past 6 months I am seeing more savvy businesses realising they need to manage the unstructured data that resides in every business into manageable system(s). Particularly when it comes to email, a prime example of unstructured data, can contain multiple retention periods.

Some paragraphs may refer to personal information, other paragraphs might refer to product liability and whilst remaining paragraphs may refer to contractual matters. Who decides what length the email should be kept for, the employee, manager or the employer? Often this is when the mistake is made; companies need to treat the disease. One needs to recognise the email system is owned by the employer and they carry the liabilities, therefore it is up to the employer to dictate and set the policy for retention. The employer should be ensuring retention policies and appropriate technologies are in place to make certain records like these are retained and can be discoverable at a later date, whether it is 6 months, 7 years or 10 years later. Could you find every email sent and received from your organisation from 3 years ago today? If not, why not?

Many organisations using Cryoserver have already treated the disease with the implementation of Cryoserver, the email compliance and archiving solution. I am aware with some clientele the Cryoserver eDiscovery interfaces have been used to fight off million dollar legal cases and they have won because they had treated the disease with the implementation of the solution years earlier and can prove categorically who said what and when.