Symantec plugs email archiving

Symantec has hit the promotional trail to advocate the wider adoption of its email archiving product, Enterprise Vault.

The security vendor has reported that it has signed 150 Australian customers for the product in the last 18 months and is now a national e-discovery seminar series with intellectual property & technology lawyers Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

Citing Enterprise Strategy Group research, Symantec APAC regional director, Bjorn Engelhardt, said only five percent of organisations were currently employing a systematic approach to archiving email.

This was despite the fact that up to 80 percent of corporate intellectual property is retained within email systems – making it the de facto record keeping system for most organisations.

This was particularly worrying in light of the growing emphasis on compliance-related record keeping inspired by the fall of Enron.

“Email is still not being treated as a business record,” he said. “People pay little attention to email which can be potentially [legally] binding.”

While smaller organisations often used backing up to CD and larger organisations employed content managing systems, both these systems were inherently risky, Engelhardt said.

“The biggest problem with enterprise content management systems is that the classification of email is voluntary and is done by employees,” he claimed. “Each user has to make the decision on what email to keep and how long for.”

Instead organisations needed to automate these decisions based on policy decided by an IT administrator, Engelhardt said.

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