Excuses

Despite the increasing publicity about the need for organizations to have an email archive solution in place, there are still many who don't.  Legislators are more than aware of this and take a dim view of any company who doesn't have such a system in place.

Mainly the excuses given are of ongoing costs, complicated implementation, maintenance, uncertainty about the legislation and unclear needs of users.  All of these reasons are relatively simple to address.

Ongoing costs is a legitimate concern for any business, but not a valid reason for non-compliance.  Self maintained systems are expensive  but can sit alongside existing infrastructures and support teams.  The potential expense spared by having a useable solution could far outweigh the costs incurred.  If not for legal reasons then for informational reasons.  Say for example your sent a contract via email and the client made changes but didn't tell you.  If that contract was ever questioned and you didn't have a valid backup of it your organization could lose out.  If you had a secure and legitimate backup copy then you have an adequate defense if it came to it.

Complicated implantation is another valid concern, but again not enough to prevent implementation.  An archive strategy can be complicated to draw up, but most good solution vendors will assist in this.  A lot of solutions are bolt-ons that you add to your network, configure and leave to do its job.  Other vendors offer completely off site solutions that just connect to your messaging infrastructure and does everything automatically.  So while on the surface it may seem complicated, it doesn't have to be.

Maintenance is an ongoing headache for any IT department.  Ones that include email archives is no different, yet the systems themselves need relatively little maintenance.  Once installed and configured, most on site solutions are self maintaining.  It will do its own backups and tell you when you need to add storage.  Off site archives need no maintenance whatsoever as it is all taken care of by the vendor.

Uncertainty about legislation is not a valid reason for non-compliance.  Although the prevailing laws are complicated there is enough information published that any difficulties should be able to be overcome.  If not then most lawyers, and email archive vendors will have specialists who can advise you on what your obligations are.

The unclear needs of users seems a thorny issue, but really shouldn't be.  They need protecting from malicious users and from themselves.  This issue is important enough that users needs have to come secondary to business ones.  A decent archive won't impact the users at all, and most won't even know there is such a thing until they need it.

There are no good reasons why a business ignores compliance.  The expense and extra work that implementing a system requires is far less than being caught short without one.