Depending on your type of business many federal or state regulations may require your company to archive email messages for electronic discovery.  As a smart proactive measure, more companies are voluntarily archiving email to protect themselves in case of a lawsuit. Lately, more are choosing to use Exchange Server journaling as an archiving method.  The question becomes, ‘Is journaling the best business decision?.  Or does implementation of a dedicated archiving solution provide a more secure data retrieval mechanism?’

Journaling and email archiving within Exchange Server are 2 distinct animals. Based on predetermined corporate policy selection criteria, archiving  removes old messages from the Exchange Server. Then the archiving software places the messages in a secure permanent repository. Journaling places a copy of target email messages into a designated mailbox.  This mailbox may usually remain on the same Exchange server as all the other staff email boxes.

The first order of business is to ensure journaling content is tamper-resistant by encrypting the traffic that’s flowing across the network. This makes man in the middle attacks much more difficult to perform.

Exchange server journaling can work as an email archiving solution, but potential data integrity tampering and security are big considerations. If your company is in an industry that is subject to federal or local regulations surrounding email archiving, then your archival solution must eliminate any doubt of tainted data due to tampering. Even in situations where you’re not required to archive email, but are doing so for your own protection, ensuring that your archiving solution is secure is still important. If a lawsuit rears its ugly head, the company’s chances of winning in court may improve dramatically if it can prove its archives are secure and messages could not be tampered with.

Journaling doesn’t offer the same level of archive protection as a dedicated email archiving application.  Dedicated archiving software addresses any tampering or data integrity issues. When it comes to legal or regulatory requests for historical emails and attached documents, dedicated archiving software eliminates any doubts that journaling may have a tendency to pose.