2010, June 2
The Importance of E-mail Retention
As the UK’s new coalition Government well knows, 2010-11 is going to be a significant year. The economy is in recovery, and the biggest challenge facing our new government will be to protect – and build on – this trend. It’s the same story for companies all around the world. 2009-10 was tough, but now this is the year to put into practice those lessons learned …and grow. Organisations have stripped much of the fat out of their operations, and protecting their bottom line remains a priority.
Last week’s news that the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has issued a fine of $700,000 to Piper Jaffray & Co. for failing to retain approximately 4.3 million emails from November 2002 through to December 2008 illustrates one of the many obstacles that can fall in the way of recovery and growth. The company, a middle-market investment bank and institutional securities firm, also failed to inform FINRA of its email retention and retrieval issues, which impacted the firm’s ability to comply completely with email extraction requests from FINRA.
A fine of almost three quarters of a million dollars isn’t small change by anyone’s standards, and could quite easily mean the difference between a bumper year and a devastating loss. The lesson must be to ensure that security is a key cornerstone of any IT strategy. Regulatory requirements are top of the list, and storing information in a sensible and easy to access archive a must. Knowing that data is stored and protected has a double benefit: money doesn’t need to be expended to find illogically archived information, and a healthy bottom line remains intact.
