Digital archiving gains favor in compliance initiatives

Whether addressing regulatory, security, liability, or some other issue tied to risk or prohibitive costs, demand is growing for digital archiving systems used to capture electronic signatures, says Arthur Riel, CTO of Lighthouse Global Technologies.

"Legal and regulatory authorities have zero tolerance when it comes to a lack of document production capabilities," Riel says. "Without the appropriate system, it might take days, weeks, or even months to find full sets of documents—and that's no longer acceptable."

The result is manufacturers are now making use of solutions such as Lighthouse's E-Trail Digital Archive, an electronic communications retention, retrieval, and supervisory system that uses any of three methods—real-time capture, batch capture, or backfilling from archive media—to capture unstructured communication data within a corporate setting.

"Essentially, the digital archival system—which is engineered with small and midsize enterprises in mind—allows users to archive and retrieve electronic communications to meet any and all regulatory, legal, or policy-enforcement issues," Riel says. "We see the most interest from companies concerned with regulatory compliance, but internal policy enforcement is a quickly growing market as well."

In that market, for example, companies that strive to improve sales & marketing effectiveness could use a digital archival system to search for common questions e-mailed to sales or customer service personnel, Riel says. Then, sales training can be adapted to include coverage of that topic, or a FAQ section could be established on the company's Web site.

Lighthouse also offers a Microsoft Outlook client component that delivers seamless integration between Outlook and E-Trail Digital Archive.

One benefit is enabling users to establish policies on Exchange servers to auto-delete email—such as deleting all correspondence more than 60 days old, or deleting the oldest correspondence in any mailbox that exceeds a company specified storage maximum, leaving behind identifier stubs that the Outlook client uses to retrieve e-mail from the E-Trail Digital Archive. Consequently, there are potential sizable savings that may result from reduced storage costs and server upgrades.

"Effective mailbox management offers a significant return, and payback can be realized in a few months," Riel says. "The big benefit comes from reduced storage costs because the system doesn't need 24/7 real-time storage. Instead, you can pull communications from the stubs. And because the user still sees the stubs, the look-and-feel of the mailbox doesn't change."