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Businesses are not just obliged to manage email. For many financial services firms, instant messaging has become a vital communications mechanism - but also one they must track.
A $1.45 billion fine, imposed on investment bank Morgan Stanley in May 2005, has done much to highlight the importance of a robust message archiving system. The award was imposed not because the judge had found conclusively against the company, but because Morgan Stanley executives had repeatedly failed to locate and hand over emails regarded as vital to the case.
But it is not just email that businesses are increasingly obliged to manage carefully. For many financial services firms, instant messaging has become a vital communications mechanism - but also one they must track.
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Wall Street's SEC rule 17a-4, for instance, mandates that traders using instant messaging must ensure messages are archived and retrievable - and are able to show that the stored version has not been tampered with. Those kinds of records provide strong evidence in cases such as that of Fulcrum Global Partners where, in February 2005, the US National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) fined a research analyst for circulating rumours about a company via IM, while simultaneously short selling that company's stock.
When it comes to archiving instant messages, businesses have three main choices: to use the basic archiving capabilities of enterprise IM platforms (consumer IM products such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger have no facilities for capturing messages as they are exchanged); implement an IM gateway that can provide advance archiving features; or export the messages into a message archiving system.
Whatever the technology choice, the principal of IM archiving should be the same as those applied to email, says Erica Rugullies, principal analyst at IT management consulting group, Forrester Research. By storing emails and IMs in the same archive system, businesses can "gain the benefits of a consistently applied policy: a single place in which to perform supervision activities; a reduced number of locations in which to undertake discovery; and reduced training requirements."
Storage strategies
In developing common message archiving policies, businesses still face some tricky choices. At supermarket group Somerfield, its 3,500 email accounts generate 100,000 incoming and outgoing messages each month. The email system is frequently used to negotiate with buyers, leaning that any email could potentially contain vital information. Using email archiving software from Veritas (now part of security and storage software vendor Symantec), the supermarket has stored 11 million emails since introducing the software in March 2002.
But Somerfield's approach of retaining all email is impractical for some. The BBC, for instance, has "a very definite retention strategy that includes deletion," explains Keith Little, head of IT. The organisation is faced with twin pressures of legal regulations, such as the Freedom of Information Act, and business pressures - in its case, to direct the maximum amount of licence fees into programme making.
"We've gone down the road of introducing an information management policy," says Little, "where the value of data to the business is assessed, and the way it is stored is based on its value. Email is defined as business critical."
