Cloud-based archiving could be the answer to legislative communication requirements. Managing risk and ensuring legislative compliance can often be a delicate balancing act when adopting new technologies within the workplace.
Even electronic messaging, which enjoys widespread adoption within business environments the world over, carries its own challenges in terms of legal amenability and data security, believes Chistelle Hicklin, Customer Experience Manager at Mimecast South Africa.
"Over the course of the past two decades, e-mail has proven itself as the backbone of corporate communication. Despite this, many organisations still find it challenging to ensure long-term compliant data storage in a secure manner."
In response, it has become vital for businesses to begin adopting tight data retention systems that are equipped to catalogue and store communication in the face of growing data volumes.
"The sheer number of e-mails generated within the average corporate communication environment, coupled with legislative requirements, has strengthened the rising popularity of unified archiving systems. By applying a holistic solution, such as Mimecast Unified Email Management (UEM), businesses are now able to comply with legislative requirements while storing valuable data in an easily accessible and secure repository - the cloud."
South African law firms have increasingly become adopters of cloud technology - certainly in terms of e-mail services - enjoying the reduced cost and complexity, but also, critically, the granular legal hold and e-discovery capabilities that a cloud archiving service like Mimecast's can offer. E-mail is absolutely mission-critical to law firms, so legal CIOs need the peace of mind that comes with a 100% availability SLA - in layman's terms, an e-mail system that keeps e-mail flowing even if the mail server goes down.
Hicklin believes an off-premise, cloud environment is the ideal solution for the storage and archiving of corporate electronic communication."A cloud-based solution such as Mimecast UEM allows businesses access to a scalable information repository, which is secured by advanced encryption standards and equipped with e-discovery tools, which make locating specific communication threads both swift and simple."
"Archiving is not just storage - if you combine it with mailbox management, policy enforcement, security, continuity and e-discovery, it could be a very powerful tool," comments Richard Levine, managing director at IT specialist, Executive Solutions.
Looking towards the future, Hicklin believes legal compliance with regards to data retention will be bolstered by file sharing repositories, which act as collaborative points of access for all users. Put more simply, offerings such as Mimecast File Archive, which allows the organisation to easily access, consolidate and archive all information relating to a client (extending beyond the reach of e-mail), are expected to further enhance the off-premise storage of corporate communication.
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