The 8 sins of email management

 

The Email Admin has compiled a great list of the top 8 email management sins. They are good reminders of what not to do when managing company email.

#1 Absence of Management – when no one is managing the company email. It’s a missed opportunity to save on storage costs and more importantly, email that isn’t managed could land you in trouble if litigation looms.

#2  Email Silo – email management isn’t just about servers, backups and users, it’s also about preventing data loss. Create a data loss plan and ensure employees are educated on safe email use.

#3 Robo Delete – Deleting email without knowing what it is or whether it is important is a big no-no. Avoid deleting something important by creating a retention policy and familiarising yourself with the company’s legal needs.

#4 Spam Complacency – while the amount of spam might be declining, it seems the spammers are getting smarter and harder to detect. Don’t let down your guard with spam filters and make sure employees know how to identify possible spam emails.

#5 – Get Ready for IPv6 – the new Internet numbering system is here and even if you don’t plan to move over to it, you should still have a plan ready for when/if you do.

#6 Tapes Aren’t Archives – backup tapes aren’t a good substitute for email archives. Unlike digital archives, tapes usually can’t be searched.

#7 Emails Aren’t Documents – email and document management aren’t the same thing and shouldn’t be bundled together.

#8 Mixed Up Media – similarly to #7, don’t mix up the types of media your document are stored on. Email is very different to paper and other documents and their retention policies should reflect that.

You can read the list in full detail here.

Cheaper storage costs can’t keep up with data volumes

Storage costs might be getting cheaper but it isn’t happening fast enough to keep up with the rapid increase in data volumes.

Founder of the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel (CGOC) Deidre Paknad writes that 90 per cent of the world’s data was created in just the last two years. CGOC has found that the majority of this data has no business or legal value to a company. Companies that are able to dispose of unnecessary data are able to reduce the costs of IT and legal and pass on the savings to shareholders. So how does a company weed out the valuable data from the junk?

According to Paknad, most storage cost-cutting programs are skirting the surface and don’t deal with the real cause of excess data because IT isn’t able to identify what data should be retained. Deleting data is risky business, with a billion possible combinations of legal and/or business value to any one enterprise employee and a single information source. The Information Governance Reference Model is helping IT negotiate the data minefield with its framework for determining and balancing data value with infrastructure availability. Paknad reports CGOC and similar organisations are collaborating with legal, compliance, records, business and IT departments from large global organisations to establish standards to help cut storage costs.

How SilverDane sees it…. reducing data storage in enterprises is a major undertaking and requires cooperation from multiple departments, each holding a piece to the puzzle that is determining what data is valuable and what can be safely deleted. It’s great to see collaboration efforts to cut the costs of storage.

Data retention laws needed to fight cyber crime in Australia

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is frustrated with efforts to combat cyber crime because of a lack of legislation.

The AFP’s assistant commissioner told the audience at this month’s Cyber Security Summit that the government needs to introduce measures like the proposed two year online data retention law if authorities are to be able to properly investigate cyber crime. Neil Gaughan said the data retention laws are needed to help the AFP investigate Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and other meta data that could lead to the prosecution of online criminals.

The Privacy Act currently requires breaches of personal privacy to be reported but there are no mandatory reporting requirements. Gaughan said he understands that businesses are hesitant to report data breaches to customers for fear of the damage to their reputation, but he said it currently limits the AFP’s information sharing on cyber criminal groups.

Gaughan said more data breaches go unreported in Australia than in countries where mandatory breach notification legislation exists.

Read the full article here: AFP assistant commissioner calls for data retention laws