This is a follow-up to a previous post: “Outside email use puts companies at risk”.  As it turns out, the use of personal email accounts at work is pretty wide spread.  Michael Osterman, the president of Osterman Research, released a study earlier this month, which reveals that 60% of employees interviewed at midsize to large companies are using personal email accounts for business communication on a regular basis. In fact, 17% admit of doing so every day.

Paul D’Arcy of MessageOne makes an even more revealing statement in a recent article in NetworkWorld:

“For e-mail to be lost it needs to be deleted by the sender and the recipient, neither can have archiving software and the backup tapes must be destroyed.”

Clearly, ignoring the issue is not a wise or defensible strategy, and can prove rather costly in litigation. Instead, companies should:

• Deploy a comprehensive archiving solution,
• Implement an email retention and destruction policy,
• Establish clear corporate guidelines on personal and business email use, and
• Monitor and enforce these policies on an ongoing basis.

Additionally, larger organizations are well advised to implement regular “dry-runs” of retrieving archived content, not only to verify the fidelity of the backups, but to train the IT staff on these procedures.

And let’s not forget that instant messaging falls under the same rules as email.

Technorati Tags: email archiving, compliance

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