Talk the talk

Brendan Nolan, chief executive of email management specialist Waterford Technologies, talks to David Clerkin.

Tell us about email archiving. Why is it so important?

The demand for email archiving is being mainly driven by two things - regulation and storage management. Many legal cases today are using email for proof of evidence. A company’s ability to produce evidence or defend itself using email evidence is very dependent on how they retain email and how easily it can be retrieved if necessary.

Our MailMeter Archive provides a complete and secure archive, and gives organisations deep and provides insight into email content, attachments and interaction patterns between users over time. Management can immediately use the archive to understand the context of email, who is misusing it, the risks they can create and exactly what is going wrong.

How good are companies and individuals at managing email? Are most people’s inboxes in the same chaotic state as my own?

Most email users use their email system as a filing system. But email servers were never designed for this purpose.

Most companies and employees are struggling to cope with the pure volume of email that they are sending and receiving. Even in a small organisation, the volume of email generated makes archiving difficult. In addition, regulations require that companies are able to retrieve archived email at short notice, making the process even more complex. With MailMeter, the archiving process needs very little ongoing maintenance.

What standards and laws do companies have to worry about when it comes to information retention and storage?

Companies need to be able to fulfil requests for emails for legal cases, HR complaints, and compliance officer requests. There are a number of legal and regulatory requirements that are forcing companies to archive electronic communication including email such as Sarbanes Oxley, Securities and Exchange Commission, Financial Services Authority, Freedom of Information and new banking regulations such as Basle II.

What bad habits should companies watch out for?

Storage of large non-business-related content in the mail system such as pictures, videos, music files and jokes. Large volumes of non-business-related email circulating around the system. This needs to be monitored to watch for inappropriate material, racist, bullying or threatening behaviour.

Please tell us about your company.

The company was founded in July 2000. Initially we developed software for other companies acting as an outsourced software provider. Then in 2001 we started to develop our own product which by 2002 had morphed into MailMeter Insight, which was our first product for email reporting. Our original product had an email reporting element which was highlighted as a good idea during a focus group that we ran in Dublin in late 2001.