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by TechShowNetwork

3 Things Businesses Need to Know About Email Compliance

In today’s business world, we are nothing without our email. Now, we don’t even need to be sitting in our office to hear the ding of our inbox, alerting us that yet another message has arrived; we live in a time where smart phones are everywhere and we can have our email with us at all times. With all this new technology though, there has also come an onslaught of laws that are designed to keep email compliant with things like customer privacy, law enforcement investigations, and corporate governance. In short, the purposes of the laws are to make sure that email is being used, and managed, properly.

If you work for a doctor’s office, you certainly know about HIPAA. The two rules that affect email compliance are the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule. Of the two, the Security Rule is more in-depth and essentially mirrors the Privacy Rule; its purpose is to focus on information and security best practices and revolves around the security cornerstones of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The Security Rule focuses on everything from workstation management of information to facility access and transmission security. It is vital that any information you send via email, not speak of the patient’s identity or the problem they are facing; many offices will use initials when speaking about patients via email.

In the financial industry, email compliance is governed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Also known as GLBA, it is basically the same law as HIPAA, just for a different type of business. It is designed to ensure the privacy and security of non-public personal information as it relates to individuals financial information. GLBA’s rules apply to mortgage lenders, banks, stock firms and others of the like. Within GLBA, the financial company is charged with several things: to designate an employee or employees to coordinate the information security program, to identify reasonably foreseeable risks to non-public information, to make sure their suppliers are also using safeguards, and to monitor all of the above.

On top of these two rules, there are also others. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also known as SOX, is watched over by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This act was designed in response to the various, and highly publicized, bogus financial reporting in the early 2000s. SOX discusses what information may leave an organization and how long the industry should keep information on file; it requires that financial companies keep emails on file for six years. Likewise, the SEC Rule 17a-4 and NASD Rules 3010 and 3110 affect email communications within the financial industry.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to email compliance, there are rules everywhere, and your business needs to know which apply to you and how to handle them. There are several ways to handle these issues, most of which include hiring at least some type of IT security firm to develop a total information security plan that will comply with recent, and future, government email regulations.

Related Email Compliance Articles

by Robinson Film Center

The Argument Why Businesses Should Opt For A Mezzanine Floor As An Alternative To Moving Factory

In recent times, mezzanine flooring has become popular with business owners, who need to expand their premises on a budget. With the credit crunch, mezzanine floors have become a cost effective way of expanding space. So what is it about mezzanine flooring that makes it so popular? Why do business choose not to buy new premises or extend an existing office? We discuss the benefits of mezzanine floors in detail.

The main function of mezzanine flooring is in creating space. Businesses often find they have expanded at such a rate that there simply isn’t enough desk space left. The last thing a business owner wants is employees falling over each other! The way in which mezzanine floors work, is they extend on top of existing office space. Thus, creating space almost out of thin air! Say for example you own a factory, where your employees work downstairs. Mezzanine flooring can sit right on top of this space. You can therefore double the available space in a factory.

The main clear benefit of this has to be saving money. Extending additional space will cost in both builder’s fees and the various level of bureaucracy. Alternatively you can purchase a new office. This is a very expensive option in the present economic climate. Mezzanine flooring is extremely cost effective in this respect as you are making use of space you already have, and optimising it.

Mezzanine floors makes excellent extra storage area. If you are currently struggling for space, you can free up wasted floor space at ground level by building a mezzanine floor above your ground floor. Here you can store anything from spares to documents. For distribution companies, mezzanine flooring makes a fantastic storage method.

If your business is expanding and you are running out of space, the last thing you are going to want to is move premises. Imagine all the hassles associated with moving. Staff will have to have their desks moved. You will have to find and locate new premises which can be a real hassle. You will have to apply for a range of permits all over again. Choose mezzanine flooring and avoid all this hassle. Clear extra space on the ground floor, by moving supplies and equipment, and storing them above on a mezzanine floor.

As a business, being as cost effective as possible is incredibly important. The current economic downturn has seen to this. Mezzanine floors are efficient and cost effective. There are a plethora of mezzanine flooring companies to take your pick from. Thus if you need to expand office space, and were considering moving or extending, why not give mezzanine floors a go?

Find More Mezzanine Floors Articles

by George

Why Businesses need a Solution for Outlook Email Archiving

Ranging from business compliance to the performance of Outlook itself there are many reasons why in today’s world a company needs to look for a successful Outlook email archiving solution. There are a number of issues that businesses face with regards to email archiving and compliance below this article focuses on the more critical issues and some of the solutions to these problems. Whilst this article is focusing predominantly on businesses that use the Outlook and Microsoft Exchange systems much of what is discussed will be relevant to all businesses, particularly in the US and the UK.

Research has shown that the average worker can spend up to 90 minutes of every workday managing their mailboxes and performing archiving and data management tasks. This leads to loss of productivity to the entire business. Aside from the productivity issues most Exchange servers are only set to backup information once per day, meaning that any emails that have been deleted through the course of a day are not archived this can also be said to the auto archiving feature that Outlook has.  Also due to the way that the auto-archive feature works, finding a specific email that has been archived is incredibly laborious and time consuming.

There are several issues that need to be looked at with regard to the need for a good email archiving solution, these issues are outlined below.

Data flow over time

Before looking at any of the legal ramifications or performance problems of not having a good email archiving solutions it is important to first look at the points which create these issues.

Even smaller companies will generate massive amounts of emails over a long period of time.  This is caused by storage of emails and attachments, however part of the problem stems from having all versions of these emails stored for example: an email is sent out with a 1 MB attachment to every employee (30 people). Every reply to that email is also now being stored along with the original email text. Whilst the email sizes are not of any real significance at this point, over a period of a year with multiple instances of this example the storage required will add up, especially with taking into account the attachment being saved also.

Auto Archiving

Many businesses feel that they have no problems with archiving as they have the Outlook auto archiving in place for their company emails. This unfortunately is not as helpful as it may at first seem to be.  As mentioned earlier, any emails deleted prior to the auto-archive taking place are not archived.  This in itself provides massive issues with compliance which will be covered later. 

A common problem shared by all companies that rely on the Outlook auto archive tool is initially the build up of emails and more specifically the overall deterioration of performance from the Microsoft Exchange servers as a consequence of a large email volume.  As the Exchange servers fill with archived emails the system begins to slow and takes longer to perform each backup. The servers filling also increase the chance of a critical systems failure.

Outlook saves all email data as .pst files when it archives the old emails. Many .pst files will be created over time as bulk archives are created over a period of time. How often this happens depends on the specific settings a company has organised themselves and how many emails the company has sent and received within specifically set parameters. These parameters would be determined by the company’s individual settings.  The more data stored on a .pst file the slower the servers and Outlook will function for their various daily tasks such as a backup.

A more pressing concern with the way that Outlook auto archive functions however is that bulk email packages are saved as .pst files, specifically a maximum storage per file of 20 GB. 20 GB of space can store thousands of emails; if a .pst file is corrupted the information on every one of those emails can potentially be lost forever.  Aside from the difficulty for an individual to navigate these files to locate specific emails when called upon to do so, if the files are lost this can provide very costly issues with regard to compliance.

Compliance

The issues of compliance covers multiple different points that will affect companies to different degrees depending on what countries they are in or do business with. That said all of these points are worth understanding as the laws are quickly changing world wide to cover the issues raised by emails being regarded as legal documents. Whilst the specifics below are predominantly for the UK, other countries will have similar laws with different specifics laid out.

Freedom of Information Act 2000 (UK)

The public have the right to ask for copies of emails from public authorities. The authorities then have 20 days in which to provide the copies.

Data Protection Act

Individuals have the right to request for copies of personal data held about them by an authority or company. The authority or company then has a 40 day time frame for compliance; failure to comply can lead to heavy fines.

Employment Tribunals

The highest possible award at a tribunal for unfair dismissal in the UK is £66,200. With more communication in the places of work happening via email, companies need to ensure that they have easy access to all possible evidence available to protect themselves

Court Actions

A wronged party has 6 years from the date that a contract has been breached or a civil wrong committed to bring a court action. With emails potentially being used by either party it is necessary for a company or organisation to be able to access any information required that was stored within those previous 6 years. This means it is paramount that an organisation has the best possible email archiving system available to them.  The system the organisation uses can make the difference between winning and losing a court action.  Furthermore inability to provide requested evidence can result in heavy fines depending on the nature of the court action, thus having the ability to store and easily find the information could avoid these fines before a court action ever reaches a court.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

This is a piece of US legislation also affects any company outside of the US which is listed on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, including subsidiaries of US companies that are themselves based outside of the US. The Act states that any transactional data meet the requirement of the Act.  Furthermore the Act sates over several sections that an organisation’s IT department is obligated to be able to provide any and all electronic data pertinent to a potential case during the discovery period in the event of a lawsuit or investigation.  Simply put an organisation must be able to provide copies of any electronic data as requested during the discovery period, the period prior to a case where evidence is collected to prepare for the legal proceeding, to a legal action.  Failure to provide the evidence in the discovery period results in heavy fines which are weighted against the nature of the legal proceeding.

The Solution

Most of the problems outlined above are not new and have been occurring for years, however with the exponential increase in the use of computers and by extension email these problems have begun to be far more severe and obvious.  The only possible solution is for a company to utilise an email archiving solution. The qualities one should look for in an email archiving solution, as outlined by the problems listed above, are as follows:

Can function independently from the Outlook’s auto archive facility Allows for settings to be standardised with capacity for users to create and archive new email folders with ease A program that does not rely on storing emails in bulk but instead saves each email individually so as to avoid the issues of file corruption. However still provides the functionality to archive files at the same time A solution that allows for customised archiving structures allowing companies to tailor how and where the files are saved. A solution which allows for deletion upon archiving of the emails from Outlook to again avoid high email volume effecting Microsoft Exchange servers Intuitive design to negate the need for training or complications prior to use of the solution. A solution that saves emails in a format that is readable independently of Outlook

It is important that all these criteria be met at the very least when looking for a solution to email archiving with Outlook to avoid all of the problems listed above. In the end avoiding these problems could save your business time and money and avoid the issue of decreased productivity from staff spending too much time organising mailboxes.

MsgSave is an Outlook add-in designed to tackle all of the afore mentioned issues and many more. MsgSave is offered in 3 different versions to meet your specific needs. MsgSave is a product of Sarcophagus a leader in IT business solutions.

by City College Norwich

Email Management Policies and Why Businesses Need One

Email management could be a company’s saving grace in today’s world of litigation and information overload. Email is now one of the most used communication systems around, over which important business decisions are often made, therefore an adequate email management system is vital to any business.

Managing one’s emails effectively could result in a much more productive work environment in terms of organization and timeliness, as well as helping with audit purposes. Furthermore, recent legislation has made it mandatory that all businesses and organizations need to be able to produce any documentation requested by the courts if legal issues arise.

Email Archiving as part of email management

Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. Administrators can maintain an archive of all the company’s email correspondence which will be easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduce the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and are not secure backups of email data.

Moreover, in order to comply with eDiscovery requests, email archiving is a must, whilst being able to access archived emails and corporate data in a matter of seconds can help realize a return on investment and therefore boost the company’s productivity.

Legislation and Regulations

Apart from the legal benefits that an email management policy presents, it is also important when dealing with inter-company issues such as harassment or dismissal charges, where critical information may have been recorded via email.

If an employee used his work email account for illicit purposes, verifying such a fact could prove to be a difficult task without an adequate email archiving system.

Email management from a legal perspective requires organizations to keep records of email documentation for a minimum period of up to five years. Such legislation includes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which affects all industries and imposes severe penalties on anyone who deliberately alters or deletes documents with the intent to defraud third parties.

Even though it is a US law, SOX act is also applicable to European companies with US listings as well as to companies that do business with the US. There are other legislations that also require companies and organizations to archive emails, as well as government bodies that comply with the regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, National Archive Records Administration (NARA) and other legislative entities.

Storage & Knowledge Issues with Email Management

Managing one’s emails is not only a legal and compliance issue but also delves into the fields of storage and knowledge management. There has been a dramatic increase in storage size due to the increase in email usage over the years as well as the upsurge in attachments sent with original emails.

This increase has affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. An efficient email archiving solution stores emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings and centralizes your email records.

Furthermore, emails are automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do so without having bulky PST files stored locally.

Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for an email management policy a critical issue for any company. Managing emails through archiving allows organizations to have control over employees’ email accounts whilst ensuring regulatory and corporate compliance.

More Email Management Articles

Second Hand Catering Equipment is Best for Small Businesses

Catering equipments

The food industry is rising at a fast pace in the contemporary times. The various trends and etiquettes that are coming up make it necessary that the food industry also rises up in the standards so as to come within shoulders with the other contemporary fields and industries. Catering equipment is one the ways by which the food industry can excel in business and can reach immense heights. Catering equipment are basically those equipments which help in serving and delivering the food items in a very elegant and better way.

There are various kinds of catering equipment that cater to the needs of different branches of food industry and include cooking equipments, utensils, cutlery, bowls, spoons, knives, ovens, microwaves and tableware. These catering equipments are not limited to just those people who move from one place to another and deliver food but also by people who organize various events. In fact, these are also used widely by restaurateurs, local authorities, hospitals along with domestic catering service providers.

Second hand catering equipment

The catering equipment is fundamentally used by the businesses in food industry to boost their sales by showcasing effective serving capabilities and delivery manners. These equipments are manufactured all over the world as they are needed by many businesses and various event organizing firms. Many of the businesses these days are also availing second hand catering equipment over fresh and brand new catering equipment. It is usually the businesses that have low capital to invest or which cannot afford to spend much on these catering solutions, who prefer the second hand catering equipment. As it comes very cheap and at very affordable prices, these small scale businesses can also utilize them to promote their business and have a sales increase in their services provided. These second hand catering equipment are also very easily available in the market. They can be conveniently availed online as well that also saves a lot of time, energy and money.

Availing second hand catering equipment online

There are many websites that avail you with a wide variety of second hand catering equipment. Apart from saving money, time and energy, there are plenty of other benefits of availing these items online. Some of those benefits are:

Ø The online service providers of the catering equipment have all the categories listed out so that you can easily browse through all the options that are available to you. It saves a lot of your time and thus you can decide on the final items you want without any hurry or stress.

Ø You can avail massive discounts when you purchase second hand catering equipment online. In fact, various lucrative offers can also be availed from time to time.

Ø You can easily access these websites any time of the day as they are available all the 24 hours.

Ø When you shop online you get absolute guarantee and a good warranty period with the catering equipment concerned. So, you simply need to find the catering equipment you want the service provider and avail the facilities while sitting at home.

So, avail second hand catering equipment now and provide a boost to your business.