Staying on Message
To answer compliance concerns and e-discovery demands, state and local governments install e-mail archiving.
By Tommy Peterson

Technician Jay Haberkorn spent part of his summer rolling out an e-mail archiving solution for the city of Watertown, Wis.

Last winter, the judge presiding over a lawsuit brought by a former employee against the city of Watertown, Wis., instructed city officials to produce a series of old e-mail messages as part of the relevant public record. But the municipal government retained messages for just 30 days. In the end, a consultant was hired to retrieve files from a hard drive, and the city attorney’s office combed through them to identify which were part of the public record.

It was then that City Attorney Thomas Levi decided Watertown needed an e-mail archiving system. “Increasingly in Wisconsin, public-records laws are being used to obtain e-mail and other electronic documents,” Levi says. He points out the requirements are more stringent than for e-discovery, the process by which electronic documents are requested and produced to be used as evidence in legal cases. “The city must retain the electronic record or e-mail record for seven years. Even though we were not in compliance with the law up to that time, in this one case, I had to find the old computer containing the e-mail, hire a forensic expert to retrieve the e-mail from the disabled hard drive, and spend hours deciphering which records were public and which were personal.”

Couple public-records requests with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), and it becomes clear that more government IT departments need to find a way to archive and retrieve electronically stored information as well as create and enforce policies that support compliance efforts.

In 2006, amendments to the FRCP specified that the discovery process applied to electronic documents and provided guidance as to how those documents should be handled. The amendments codified what had been a reality in the legal system for several years, according to David Goldstone, a partner at law firm Goodwin Procter in Boston.

“Courts have been treating electronic documents in the same way they treated paper documents for many years. It’s just that the number of electronic documents is multiplying exponentially. For example, some people send 50, 60, even 100 e-mails a day,” says Goldstone.

Ferris Research estimates the number of users on e-mail archiving systems will grow 55 percent between 2008 and 2010, to 32.3 million.

The issues raised by the FRCP and e-discovery for the private sector are exacerbated for state and local governments, which gather massive amounts of electronic information and often have limited resources to deal with the data, says Goldstone. Compared with private businesses, government entities with their agency’s and department’s mandates for public transparency must also deal with a wider array of retention requirements, he says.

Meanwhile, in Watertown

Like many other small cities, Watertown, with a population of about 23,000, lacks a formal IT department. Instead, a committee consisting of the city attorney and several employees with IT responsibilities in individual departments took on the job of finding and implementing an appropriate e-mail archiving technology. “It was a challenge, but city officials saw the archiving project as a priority and made funds available,” says Jay Haberkorn, a technician in the engineering department who, among his other duties, manages the server and e-mail system.

Watertown has plenty of company, as state and local governments of all sizes implement e-mail archiving to deal with regulatory and legal pressures, such as those created by the FRCP and e-discovery. The savings in time and money from improved storage management are welcome, but staying on the right side of the law is driving most new archiving efforts.

A key issue for Watertown’s committee was finding an archiving product that could operate across the city government’s three different e-mail platforms — Microsoft Exchange at city hall, Novell GroupWise at the police department and a hosted e-mail system for the water/wastewater department, says Haberkorn. Together the disparate platforms support more than 100 e-mail accounts.

“We thought about consolidating on Exchange, but the police department was reluctant to make the switch, so we found something that could tie all the systems together,” says Haberkorn.

Needing to support multiple platforms narrowed the committee’s options. The city soon settled on the Barracuda Message Archiver 350 appliance, an integrated hardware/software system from Barracuda Networks. The appliance itself cost approximately $8,000, and the city contracted for three years of support services for $2,700. In mid-May, Haberkorn and colleagues performed the rollout.

The first phase of the Message Archiver deployment, the step that sends e-mail messages into the archiving system as they are created, went smoothly.

“I was leery of us doing it ourselves, but city hall was up and running in a day, and there weren’t many problems with the other platforms,” he says. By the end of July, all existing stored e-mail had been imported into Message Archiver, to be stored on mirrored drives.

Measuring return on investment wasn’t a major consideration because compliance and legal protection for the city were the real drivers of the project, says Haberkorn. …

E-Discovery Strategy Steps

There is no silver bullet to solve the complexities of e-discovery, but these suggestions can ease the process.

• Create and enforce clear, consistent acceptable use and records retention policies. These should identify the types of records to be kept; where and how they will be stored; when, if ever, they should be deleted; and who has responsibility for deleting them. Train employees to understand what “acceptable use” means.
• Keep only what you must. Get rid of documents that aren’t needed for regulatory or organizational purposes, when it’s possible under the law. Hoarding files can result in unnecessary legal and financial risks and can make it more difficult to search for electronic documents in response to an e-discovery request.
• Understand legal holds. Your organization is obligated to preserve both paper and electronic records as soon as it is in litigation or the subject of regulatory investigation or it reasonably anticipates such an action. Your organization can be sanctioned if any relevant information is lost when litigation is anticipated. The legal term for this is “spoliation of evidence,” and penalties can include fines or criminal liability.
• Make search capabilities a priority. Making sure e-mail and other electronic documents are archived correctly is important, but the goal is efficient retrieval, and that depends on effective search algorithms.
• Map the locations of your electronic information. A map of the IT infrastructure is not enough for the purposes of e-discovery. You’ll need to identify types and sources of information and exactly where the information is kept in e-mail archives or databases…

When to Let Go

As e-mail archiving projects become increasingly widespread and essential for state and local governments, some tough but fundamental questions have to be answered, says Missouri Deputy CIO Chris Wilkerson.

“What do you retain, and how long do you retain it?” Wilkerson asks. “The Department of Natural Resources has to retain certain documents for 50 years, while some e-mail and other documents can probably be deleted in 90 days. Right now we have a directive to save everything forever. But we’ll need to look at retention in the near future.”

The flood of e-mail created by government entities will eat up prodigious amounts of storage even though archiving systems minimize redundancy. And that’s not the only reason to think about retention policies, says Bellevue (Wash.) Network Manager Shayne Williams.

“From the perspective of possible litigation, you want to make sure you keep everything the law requires, but only as much as you have to,” Williams says. “You’ve got to balance it carefully and make sure your archiving system allows you to do that.” …

Source: http://statetechmag.com/issues/october-november-2008/staying-on-message.html

Allow your IT Support Technician to access this computer

Welcome to Divens Custom Data, LLC!

Divens Custom Data, LLC grew from the overwhelming need for technical assistance by co-workers and friends. I was amazed to find how little help there is out there for small businesses and the Average Joe (or Jane).

I spent 15 years as the IT Director for a large automotive industry supplier creating a robust IT infrastructure for several locations in Northeast Ohio. This infrastructure included specialized systems for HR, Quality, Shipping, Engineering, Accounting, Purchasing, Production and Maintenance. In 2007, I decided to branch out and begin to operate Divens Custom Data full-time.

Divens Custom Data, LLC provides a full-spectrum of IT services used by the small to medium business sector. Whether you only have one or two employees or over 100, we can design systems to make you and your organization more effective allowing you to concentrate on your core services. We can enable your sales staff to break free from the office but still maintain access to the information necessary to get the job done. We have enabled companies to offer their employees the ability to work at home through a secure connection back to the office. Divens Custom Data, LLC has also provided custom database applications to companies for sales commission tracking, gage calibration, and training documentation.

Next time you have a need for technical assistance give us a call. We can make technology work for you without the commitment of a full-time IT staff.

- Randy Divens