EAS' unique archive rule flexibility combined with its granular searching, storage security and archive records management, has been shown to satisfy all interpretations of legal advice and best practice with regard to the management of electronic mails.

EAS is being used in many organisations to underpin compliance with a variety of Acts and legislation, including the FSA, DPA, Basel II, The Companies Act, Freedom of Information Act (including response to subject access requests (SARs)) and so on.

Often legislation is vague, conflicting and subject to interpretation. Similarly many organisations are aware that legislation is imminent, but have yet to receive clear guidelines on what needs to be retained and for how long.

The ability to be flexible is therefore paramount - and certainly EAS will give you this. In addition to the most comprehensive archive policies imaginable, EAS also allows retention and disposal policies to be extended, or indeed implemented, ‘post archival’, with the ability to apply policies according to content.

This means organisations can start archiving now, and retrospectively apply the required retention policies as they evolve over time.  It also removes the onus on the end-user to correctly folder items prior to archiving.

In brief, the essential and fundamental aspects of EAS that will enable organisations to be compliant with existing and future legislation include:

- Real-time capture of all emails (prevents a back-log that could allow tampering)
- Storage of items in a secure, unalterable state for the specified retention period.
- CRC Checksum to ensure authenticity.
- Option to encrypt.
- Centralised management of data and policy enforcement.
- Total lifecycle management of archived items.
- Automated removal of references and/or the original email from the users inbox when the item in question is policy-deleted.
- Capture of 'historic' emails - both on email servers and from personal archives.
- Rapid and incisive inspection of archived items by authorised individuals.
- Auditing of all archive search, retrieval and administrative functions.
- The ability to create information boundaries.
- Support of different policies for different parts of the organisation.
- A 'non-transactional' approach to writing data (aids compliance with BSI PD5000)
- The ability to be selective in what is retained (DPA, RIPA)
- The ability to extend the retention of specified items (e.g. meets FSA optional extension)
- Built in protection against media obsolescence (meets BSI/ISO requirements)
- Extremely secure storage (meets BSI/ISO requirements)
- Tight access control and security management (meets DPA requirements etc)
- Support of compliance storage devices such as optical media, WORM tape, EMC Centera and NetApp SnapLock (SEC) etc.
- The ability to export data for external inspection
- Capture Bcc'd and expand all recipients on internal alias and distribution lists.
- Support of structured content screening/auditing
- Storage failover and recovery.