The contigency volume

An idea I’ve discussed throughout this blog, and generally in all the sessions I present, is that of "transitory" email – that which has no long-term business relevance – and which consequently, companies often endeavor to purge in a timely manner. Yesterday I considered the premise of the "exception driven model", which maintains email is transitory by default, unless some overt action is taken to dictate otherwise. Such an approach is, of course, aggressive – and oftentimes may leave organizations concerned that their policy may appear too lax in ensuring potentially discoverable messages are in fact retained.

Let's remember however, that we must balance such a concern with the principle that no organization is mandated to save everything forever. At some point, information must be disposed – what is important, is that the disposal of this information is performed in a consistent and responsible manner.

To alleviate the concern that such an exception-driven approach is too aggressive, I have noticed in recent months that companies are interested in establishing and relying on what I am beginning to label a "contingency volume". The basic premise underscoring the contingency volume is that it is designed by nature to capture 100% of all email inbound, outbound, and internal within the organizations email environment. Such email is then saved for a strict period of time, regardless of what other action is performed against that content (that is, regardless of whether it is saved as a record, or allowed to be deleted per the transitory item policy).

The contingency volume may exist in parallel to a "managed email volume". The retention policy on this contingency archive may be, for instance, 13 months – and this provides organizations with an assurance that no matter what, they have a complete picture of all email correspondences from the past 13 months, all of which is readily accessible and may be preserved in the event of litigation. Concurrently, email messages contained in the contingency volume may also have been ingested into the managed email volume as formal corporate records – or they may have been deleted from user inboxes either via outright action or automatically.

In this example, after 13 months elapses, messages that have reached this age are purged from the contingency volume (unless, of course, on litigation hold). From this point forward, any messages still existing in the environment are stored within the managed email volume. In all cases these messages will have also an explicit and oftentimes much more granular retention policy enforced against them – for instance, content associated with a project may be retained for 3 years following the conclusion of this project. Fundamentally, the "managed email volume" is the long-term repository of record for corporate email; it provides a comprehensive view of everything that was deemed business relevant and appropriate to keep. But the contingency volume provides organizations with a comfortable "fall back" – the capacity to demonstrate they acted in good faith and took extra and reasonable measures to ensure email retention, regardless of any other governing factor, be it user discretion or machine-based analysis.