Report: Data retention policies lacking, or nonexistent

Contributed by Debbie Howlett (Donnerstag, 05 August 2010) | Category : Email archiving

A recent study conducted by Applied Research found a significant number of companies are without formal data retention plans and policies.

For its research, the firm surveyed 1,680 senior IT and legal executives across 26 countries. Eighty-seven percent expressed that having a formal data retention policy in place is important in order for employees to determine which information needs to be archived and which can be deleted. However, only 46 percent of respondents stated their company currently has such a policy in place.

"There's definitely a gap in terms of what people perceive as important around information management - around retention policies, deletion policies - and what their actual practices are," Danny Milrad, an industry expert, told InformationWeek.

While companies can take the first step toward effective data management and adopt an email archiving and retention solution, ensuring employees understand the policy is just as important.

An example of this occurred last September in Boston and only recently saw closure. Boston's chief of policy and planning had been deleting his emails and was unable to produce more than 18 emails sent and received during a prolonged period of time. The mayor's office did have a policy in place, but the city official was unaware of it. During her investigation, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley found that while the city government had a retention policy in place, its management division actually encouraged employees to delete emails. The city's written policy stated the maximum retention period for email should only be 90 days after a message is opened or read, but employees should delete messages daily to avoid any problems. The guilty party was aware of this policy and thought back up was in place. However, the office had no such technology active, and this confusion lead to the scandal.

Thus, companies need to establish retention policies, make them well known among their employees, and have an automated way of enforcing them. Furthermore, companies need to determine what information is essential to keep in order to efficiently use the archiving solution's storage space. According to the survey, 75 percent of respondents use their systems for satisfying legal hold requests. These holds take up 45 percent of the total space on their systems, leaving little more than half of the solution's space for other data. According an InformationWeek article, 70 percent of all stored data is redundant. Thus, creating guidelines for which data needs to be stored is important.

With organizations such as Merrill Lynch and Piper Jaffray receiving hefty fines recently for failing to produce emails and correspondence, the importance of adopting archiving systems and enforcing retention policies is as important as ever.