Email Archiving for Banking and Finance

Your bank or financial institution may be struggling with compliance issues because you are realizing that policies by themselves are not the whole solution. You can set policies, but without a way to identify if those policies are being followed, how can your organization be certain you are in compliance?

The Issues:
The financial industry has to deal with SEC, GLBA, BASEL II, and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. You must put into place new information control policies and procedures that protect information or else face fines, sanctions or even prison time.

Every CEO spends time thinking about these regulations and how they can affect the company and personal liability. Any employee has the potential to put the company at risk if they send an e-mail with certain financial information to an unauthorized person. Once the information enters the e-mail system, definitive, auditable control over the document is no longer in place, and records around each transaction are not in an easily searchable or reportable format.

If an incident does happen that requires legal research, hundreds of hours of e-mail log file evidence discovery can cost tens of thousands of dollars by using legal forensic specialists.

How would you know how and when a policy breach has taken place? Where do you start looking — in the e-mail server log files? Good luck — that would take months just to make sense of the data. Your company's brand and reputation, not to mention your CEO personally, are potentially at risk with every e-mail that enters or leaves your domain, tens of thousands of time each day. How can a company address this concern or enforce policies if he doesn't even know anything is wrong until it's too late?

The MailMeter Solution:
With MailMeter, company executives are assured that e-mail is gathered to meet compliance requirements and have the ability to quickly drill down into issues and search for specific words, domains, or attachments in case evidence is needed.

Using MailMeter Insight reporting, managers can see the e-mail data patterns, make changes to policies, enforce policies, and show auditors that their processes are in compliance.

With MailMeter, any authorized user in the company can search e-mail data down to the message body and attachment text using an intuitive, secure, web-based interface.

E-mail Acceptable Usage Policies can be strengthened, enforced and if an incident does occur, you will quickly spot it, and can reduce the impact by fully investigating it in a matter of minutes.

MailMeter Benefits

• Full compliance with all regulations
• Save storage in your e-mail server - faster backups, disaster recovery, and better reliability
• Dramatically reduce costs of legal investigations
• Protect intellectual property
• Reduce organization and executive exposure
• Improve employee education about risky behavior
• Increase integrity of information since transactions cannot be deleted from the archive
• Improve productivity by enforcing the E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy

Important Questions to ask your IT, Legal, and Compliance Officer
As an executive, you should be very concerned at the lack of infrastructure, process and controls for archiving e-mail in your organization. You should ask your management team these important questions. If they cannot answer these questions, you may be placing your company at serious risk.

• What would be the cost or damage if your company had to pay penalty fines, or if you were fined or sanctioned for non-compliance?
• Do you have an E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
• How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
• How many times has an employee e-mailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
• How do you know if employees are e-mailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
• What percentage of your company e-mail is non-work related?
• How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?