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7 Reasons why Financial Services Companies Need to Archive Email with A Hosted Service

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Do you know the one word that will cause your financial services company a catastrophic disaster? “Just.” Often it’s used by IT managers suggesting, “Why don’t we just host our email on our own servers?”

It’s cost effective and makes sense right? Wrong.

Every CFO knows email communication is vital to their organization. Last month Home Depot suffered one of the largest email data breeches ever when 53 million email addresses were stolen from their systems.

Read the Wall Street Journal story. Hackers posing as HD vendors were able to bypass their onsite email servers accessing the database.

Security

Ask any financial services company about checks and balances. They’ll tell you it’s accounting 101 to separate your accounts receivables from your payables departments.

The same protection is a must for your archived email. Too many companies make the mistake of ignoring security safeguards protecting their email on a third party hosting provider.

The first benefit is obvious. Security. Imagine your in-house servers are hacked. While your IT team troubleshoots the gateway breech, your email is protected offsite. Hosting your email with an expert host provider ensures your data is safeguarded 24/7.

Litigation Protection

Financial services companies need to protect themselves from liability. Therefore, archiving all email offsite safeguards their communications for search and indexing. Don’t forget you’ll also be able to easily pull reports of user messages, attachments and timelines.

Regulatory Compliance

Financial compliance regulations require that all email communications must be safely stored in original form. Hosting your email locally puts your organization at risk if your servers suffer threat.

Disaster Recovery

We’ve all seen news reports of natural disasters. It’s no longer whether your community will suffer a tropical storm or power outage, it’s when.

Archived email hosting by an offsite third party provider gives you the ability to safeguard your email and maintain banking operations.

You’ll provide services to your customers virtually while your local branches await emergency services to deem your hometown safe and ready to open your doors for business again.

Auditability

Accessing your archived email communications for audits is a breeze when you use an email host. Due to litigation and compliance regulations, your organization must safeguard all email communications for up to seven years.

Storage Management

As your company grows, your email quotas will require more storage. We often see an increase of our client email data storage increase by as much as 25% per year. Plan on allocating at least 150-200 MB per user.

By archiving your email with an outsourced provider, you no longer need to invest capital in onsite servers.

Cost

Your onsite servers are best used for your users, core business products and services. The concept allocates your capital on profit generating revenues rather than expenses.

It’s far less expensive to archive your email communications with an offsite host taking advantage of their server space. It’s economical and as your storage quota grows, you’ll save thousands of dollars letting your provider invest in resources to service your needs.

 

What Muppets Mean For Business Communication

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In the latest twist in the saga of Greg Smith’s very public departure from Goldman Sachs Group, Reuters reports that the firm is now scouring the company’s internal email in search of the word “muppet.”

In his New York Times op-ed attacking his former employer, Smith alleged that his coworkers there fobbed off bad investments on clients and insulted their intelligence. In particular, he said the firm’s managing directors referred to their clients as muppets—British slang that refers not to Jim Henson’s creations but to stupid people.

The Reuters story reports that the company is reviewing Smith’s allegations, in part by scanning internal emails. That action should serve as a reminder for office workers that nothing they communicate electronically from the office is their private business.

By now, most employees are probably well aware that it’s inadvisable to send an application for a new job on office email or visit inappropriate websites on a company computer. Back in 2007, the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitored their Internet connections and a full 28 percent had fired a worker for inappropriate email use.

But Goldman Sachs’ actions show that workers need to watch what they type even if they’re pretty sure their boss wouldn’t bat an eye at what they’re saying. If a company comes under scrutiny for any reason, there’s a good chance someone will dig into all interoffice communication. Sometimes, it’s an internal investigation like Goldman’s. Other times it’s a political thing—like the way reporters dug through the largely mundane emails from Sarah Palin’s time as governor of Alaska when they were released last year.

The biggest worry for most companies is that they’ll end up in some kind of legal dispute and have an aggressive lawyer wading through their internal emails. They may even get an IT: Azure/AWS consulting company to help pull out messages that the sender and recipient thought had been permanently deleted.

Even failing to archive old messages can be dangerous in a legal battle because it might suggest that the company was trying to hide something.

The question of what to keep out of official business communication can become even more complicated when employees use company laptops or smartphones, or even when they use their own mobile devices for work purposes. Social media also blurs lines since it can be easy to lose track of whether a Twitter handle is a work tool or a vehicle for personal expression.

As with most things, it’s always a good idea to be cautious. At most companies, the best practice is probably to use email for uncontroversial work topics. Off-topic conversation, jokes and—especially—rants about a situation that’s causing problems should be saved for the water cooler or the bar after work.

And if you feel an urge to call a client a muppet, it’s probably a good time to just bite your tongue. After all, that’s what Kermit would do.