Archiving electronic communications isn’t just for compliance departments or records managers.

In fact, if you work in information technology (IT), human resources (HR), legal or internal auditing and you’re not archiving your electronic records, you’re missing a major opportunity to make your department, division or entire organization less vulnerable to risk. You’re probably also missing out on a way to make your job easier and simpler.

Your industry peers are getting the message. For example, in a 2013 survey of compliance professionals in the financial services industry, more than 75% of respondents produced data from their electronic communications archiving solutions for non-compliance purposes at least once per year. E-discovery, internal audits or data recovery were often cited as the cause. One in five respondents said they produced data that wasn’t for compliance more than 10 times per year.

Capturing and preserving electronic communications makes sense for many reasons. Here’s a quick look at how four critical business functions benefit from electronic communications archiving today.

Information Technology

A comprehensive archiving solution can serve several key functions for IT. Also, in the absence of a compliance team (or in tandem with compliance), IT might use an archiving solution to help manage data security responsibilities and enforce information governance—as well as compliance policies.

Other key benefits to IT include:

• Streamlining of data recovery and restoration. Nobody likes mounting backups to restore operations. Offloading emails and files to an archiving system can help expedite recovery time if a data restore or retrieval procedure is needed.

• Improved storage management. The migration of email and other files from servers to archival storage can significantly decrease the volume of content stored on a company’s servers. This optimizes server performance, and results in faster backups and restoration of service in the event of an interruption. Preserving data in the archive—a separate location—can also provide peace of mind.

• Increased employee productivity. An archiving solution can enable employees to access and retrieve their older (or missing) emails and attachments without IT intervention.
Legal

Legal drivers rank among the most important reasons to proactively archive electronic content.

Legal departments often need to quickly produce forensically sound electronic communications records or published content (e.g., website pages) from a specific point in time. Without a good archiving solution in place, legal teams must scramble to assemble content from multiple sources when it’s requested—which is often too late. However, with an archiving solution in place, the legal team can perform:

• E-discovery. In litigation events that require the exchange of information in electronic format, a legal team may use its company’s archiving solution to search for, review and produce data related to the case.

• Legal holds/retention policies. Relevant information related to a legal action must be retained for as long as necessary after the action has been initiated, or when decision makers can reasonably expect such an action will likely occur. An archiving solution is often used to hold the relevant information for the duration.

• Early case assessments. The ability to search an archive of electronic content can be valuable in helping managers, legal staff or outside attorneys perform assessments of an organization’s legal position before a legal action begins, or during its early stages. It can also help decision makers decide whether to pursue a legal action or settle beforehand.

Human Resources

Beyond the responsibilities of managing an organization’s employees through attracting, training and assessing employees, HR also helps ensure compliance with employment laws.

Archiving and monitoring electronic communications is vitally important to HR for a number of reasons, including:

• Mitigating risk. The archiving and supervision of electronic communications helps HR mitigate risk and build context around potential HR violations (e.g. inappropriate remarks or conversations initiated by employees) and any employee rights violations. Archiving of social media or enterprise social media (such as Microsoft Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Jive) can be especially helpful to HR to mitigate risk associated with team collaboration and conversations.

• Investigations. Many HR professionals are asked to search and retrieve a specific set of emails or social media messages during a legal or internal investigation. Archiving electronic communications makes this process much easier, because a review of email, social media, and enterprise social or instant messaging conversations from a specific time period (or from specific individuals) can help HR piece together the narrative and facts around events, employee dismissals and so on.

Internal Auditing

Internal auditors rely on electronic communications archiving and supervision to help an organization evaluate the effectiveness of its risk management, control and governance processes. A comprehensive archiving solution can help auditors with:

• Content Preservation. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires all public companies and their auditors to retain relevant records such as audit work papers, memoranda, correspondence and electronic records—including email—for a period of seven years. Businesses also have to ensure employees preserve information that’s relevant to company financial reporting.

• Identifying fraud. The global financial crisis has led to increased scrutiny of fraud and company errors by industry regulators. Many organizations are aiming to better manage and protect themselves against fraud. The archiving and supervision of electronic communications helps company auditors identify any corporate fraud, abuse or errors.

And last but not least, thousands of statutory requirements in the United States and around the world require the retention of business records, including content found in email, social media, instant messaging, files and other sources. These requirements affect a broad range of sectors, including energy, financial services, healthcare, publicly held corporations and government.

While archiving and supervision solutions are often viewed as tools for demonstrating regulatory compliance, they have solid overall value for business—arming decision makers with information and helping different departments mitigate corporate risk.

Does archiving make sense for you and your department? Talk about it with your team. Maybe there’s a way for several departments to collaborate and buy in together. In the meantime, the resources below will help you dig deeper. Give it some thought—just don’t wait until the next crisis hits.