Cryoserver archives emails from the journal (the journal is effectively an audit trail of emails sent and received, but not including the contents of those emails), making a forensic record of fact to satisfy both data protection and privacy requirements.
At first glance this is no different to how other email archiving products work, in that they too can archive from the journal. However, there is an important difference and this is that, in other systems, archiving from the journal is an option, and emails can also be archived selectively. With the Cryoserver solution, archiving from the journal is the only option, and it is fully automated to prevent users from tampering with the system to exclude specific emails from the archive.
Again other vendors can offer this functionality, but the real differentiator is in proving to a regulator or court that every email has been captured, which may not be possible with a system where email can be selectively captured.
All deletions within the archive are handled as audited events, and holds can be put on emails to prevent them from being deleted. Another differentiator for Cryoserver is that all searches are fully audited so that a court can see the entire process that took place to produce a set of emails including how the search was refined, which is something that is missing in many of the email archiving products.
On the hardware side, Cryoserver provides a choice of platform for the appliance, enabling organizations to deploy hardware from a vendor they are familiar with. It is delivered with the Linux operating system, and all of the software is pre-installed. It is configured and tested, and supplied with tamper-evident seals. If any repairs have to be made, the tamper-evident seals are replaced afterwards, so it can be proved to a court of law that the appliance has not been interfered with.
The importance of implementing an effective email archiving came to the fore recently with the record fine of $15 million levied against Morgan Stanley by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a failure to preserve emails. The company could not guarantee that it had produced all emails relating to a pending lawsuit in May last year, when it received a $1.58 billion judgment against it. This is a problem faced by many organizations and, despite the plethora of high-profile cases of major organizations failing to retrieve emails in a timely manner, they are still failing to put email archiving solutions in place.
Implementing a product such as that from Cryoserver would have enabled Morgan Stanley to prove to the court that it had discovered all of the requested emails, and this process could have been completed in a short period of time.
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With email now admissible as evidence in a court of law, email archiving has become an integral part of email management. Monitoring email traffic, which implementing an archive helps to do, enables organizations to discover mistakes quickly and also helps to resolve disputes before they end up in court.
With regulators and courts becoming tougher and levying higher fines, the cost of a single litigation or discovery process would more than pay for a product such as that from Cryoserver. Implementing email archiving would have saved Morgan Stanley from brand damage, and would have removed the need for an expensive discovery project, which failed to prove that it had produced all of the requested emails.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
