The financial industry remains under strict legal regulations to archive and preserve communications between sellers of securities and their clients.

The following outlines some best practices specific to the financial industry for operationalizing email archiving within an organization.

First, and foremost, and especially for the financial industry, an email archiving system must be secure. Archived messages should be secure from any unauthorized access. In addition, industry regulations dictate that an email archiving system should have policies to counter against message tampering and altering or access of messages by any unauthorized users. The ability to track user access must also be in place to maintain the integrity of the entire system.

Second, a key functionality of an email archiving system is its ability to retrieve specific information rapidly and accurately. Relevancy of email messages is contingent on the ability of the system to thoroughly index by date, recipient, sender, subject line, and content so users can quickly and efficiently search for the information they need.

Third, given the amount of intellectual property inherent in email, as well as the overall need for continuous access, availability of an email archiving system is critical. Continuous uptime, redundancy and availability are needed to maintain system integrity and compliance.

Fourth, email archiving should be applied to only those messages subject to corporate governance and regulatory policies. Incoming, outgoing and internal email and attachments must all be captured and stored. With the proliferation of spam comprising the majority of email messages, an email archiving system should be discerning in that it should quickly and accurately filter out irrelevant mail before the data is archived to properly manage storage and associated costs.

Fifth, policy compliance is the responsibility of the organization and not the individual. Therefore, an email archiving solution needs to be proactive and automated. Individual email users should not have to initiate archiving of messages. It should be done automatically.

In summary, operationalizing email archiving for an organization in the financial industry requires thoughtful evaluation and rigor to properly map the organization's needs and compliance requirements with the critical functionality of an overall messaging solution. Applying best practices when evaluating archiving systems will yield a more efficient and long term solution for an organization.

Tricia Quinn is Director, Product Marketing Enterprise Hosting for NTT America. For more information on email archiving solutions or NTT America's Hosted Exchange solution please contact us at 1-888-523-4833 or email t.quinn@ntta.com.