Email Archive Monitoring
At its core, managing content is about managing risk. Actually, it is more about managing the risk of an organization losing its trade secrets, or that leaked data could quash an acquisition. It’s about managing the risk of having senior management embarrassed or that a compliance issue could bring heavy fines. These things and others could occur if a company does not properly manage the content that leaves its organization. The management of outbound content, therefore, needs to be viewed as a primary capability in any organization’s security arsenal, and should be a priority within any electronic communication policy.
The messages your employees are sending and receiving each day are most often business related. Unfortunately, their messages can also contain non-business related or business threatening content in the form of harassment, cyberbullying, sharing trade secrets, or other inappropriate content. This kind of information could cause very serious problems for you and your business.
A third-party email archiving system can easily create a backup of these messages, but it can also be used to monitor incoming and outgoing message content. Once the content is archived, it is indexed and can be easily searched and flagged as needed, for an employee’s supervisor. This indexing and searching process includes inspecting for file metadata, for industry-specific keywords and phrases, for regular expressions (e.g., email addresses), for exact file matches and finally the archiving system should be performing statistical analysis to detect specific types of content, such as employee resumes, that are sent out through email.
In heavily regulated firms, such as in the financial services industry, email review procedures, proof of email review for problematic language, and evaluation of policies for use by management staff are all critical capabilities.
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Email Archive Analytics
Another important benefit of an archiving system is that it can be used to analyze information flows within an organization, such as understanding the email, instant messaging and social media interactions between employees, customers, business partners and others. It can also be used to understand how information flows change over time. By using an archiving system for analytics, it can yield a wealth of data on customer and business partner relationships.
Conclusion
Message monitoring is essential to preventing or limiting a problem (like harassment) before it escalates. The analytics contained in your daily messages can reveal information to help with employee training and the formation of your company’s culture. By monitoring and analyzing your company’s electronic communications you manage risk and gain knowledge about how your company communicates.
Stay Tuned! Our next post will focus on one final but important benefit of archiving…reducing costs.
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Photo Credit: Binoculars V by Chase Elliott Clark is licensed under CC BY 2.0
