SIR - E-mail has become the most critical form of business communication, but in spite of increasingly punitive e-mail policies, too many organisations still experience anarchic e-mail use.

Duplication and multiple versions make it near impossible to effectively manage what is vital business information.

While a few companies have achieved a degree of control over e-mail attachments by using document management tools, what about the body of the e-mail? At the moment, a large percentage of customer interactions are sitting inside e-mail systems, locked away within individual mail boxes. Failure to monitor, control or provide access to this essential business knowledge is fundamentally leaving organisations wide open to compliance breaches and allegations of a lack of Duty of Care towards their employees.

Used correctly, e-mail is a core component of business success. The e-mail archive should be treated accordingly, thereby ensuring that all enterprise information is available to every user and every application across the business. To achieve this goal, e-mail must be stored in a fully-retrievable, auditable and searchable manner. Critically, this must be done without creating a massive storage overhead or requiring any form of user intervention.

Given the present reliance on e-mail communication (which, in many businesses, is almost total), it's high time security and IT managers imposed some degree of control over this crucial business tool.


Simon Pearce, Vice-President EMEA, Quest Software (UK)

Source

SMT