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E-mail Archiving Software Helps Manage Messages

John McCormack March 2007

With so much business conducted via the Internet, executives at Winged Keel Group Inc. decided the staff had to save each-and-every e-mail message, simply to keep the boutique life insurance and long-term disability firm on the right track.

"We are a technologically advanced company, so a lot of our business was being conducted via e-mail," says Pramod Navani, managing director of operations at the New York-based insurer. "A few years ago, our company instituted a rule that no one was allowed to delete e-mails."

In what seemed like less than an Internet minute, the new policy-while deemed necessary in the increasingly virtual environment-resulted in a couple of real-world headaches.

First off, Winged Keel trusted that its employees would adhere to the rule but had no automated means of ensuring compliance. So, in essence, employees could-advertently or inadvertently-erase or alter e-mail communications.

Second, and perhaps even more troubling, e-mail inboxes and outboxes were growing at an extraordinary rate, and the burgeoning storage requirements were slowing down the company's IT system considerably. And the lost time meant an increase in the cost of doing business, Navani says.

As a result, Winged Keel executives decided the company would have to invest in a system that helps manage and archive e-mail communications. After a review of systems the company chose e-mail archiving from Fortiva Inc., Norwalk, Conn.

While Winged Keel may have been ahead of the pack, other insurance companies are beginning to find themselves in similar situations.

To reap the benefits of electronic communication, carriers have to address e-mail management issues, particularly archiving. At the same time they face regulatory compliance concerns and legal discovery issues.

E-MAIL GROWTH

Certainly, the rapidly growing use of e-mail communications is leading-some might saying forcing-organizations, including many insurance companies, to assess automated e-mail management options.

Consider the following: Approximately 541 million workers worldwide rely on e-mail communications to conduct business.

Corporate users send and receive an average of 133 messages per day, and that number is expected to reach 160 messages by 2009, according to "Taming the Growth of E-Mail: An ROI Analysis," a white paper published by The Radicati Group Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.

With the average size of a single message currently around 0.11 MB, the daily e-mail storage requirement for a single user is 14.7 MB. Do the math and that translates to 294 MB per user, per 20-day month of five-day work weeks for companies that maintain a standard 30-day e-mail retention period. Based on those figures, enterprise e-mail costs corporations an average of $435.85 per user per year.

COMPLIANCE

Legal and regulatory issues, however, are prompting insurance companies to hold on to e-mail for much longer periods-and, subsequently, driving up storage costs even more.

To meet legal electronic discovery requirements some insurance companies now need to store e-mails for months or even years. Electronic discovery refers to the retrieval of data from a computer to meet a legal request. The term sometimes applies to data retrieval required for regulatory compliance, human resources concerns, validation of client correspondence or other corporate needs.

Although it may seem costly to hold onto all e-mail communications, failing to do so can prove even more expensive.

Last year, the inability to produce subpoenaed e-mail resulted in million-dollar lawsuits. In fact, 24% of all organizations have had employee e-mail subpoenaed, and 15% of companies have gone to court to battle lawsuits triggered by employees' e-mail, according to the "2006 Workplace E-mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey" from the New York-based American Management Association.

Some 75% of all organizations were required to search through backup tapes to retrieve one or more e-mail messages to respond to legal or human resources requests during the past three years, according to New York-based Osterman Research Inc.

"In the past two or three years, there have been lots of discovery requests from private litigants and public agencies," says Donald Light, a senior analyst in the insurance group at the Boston-based research and consulting company Celent LLC.

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