HMRC and the email trail...

Revenue & Customs, shame on you, and I bet they broke the Data Protection Act. I was reading the Information Commissioner has stated ‘almost certain’ the Revenue & Customs department had broken the Data Prtoection Act. What hope is there for all of us law abiding citizens and companies who making great efforts and spending a lot of money on getting our own procedures in place to protect data.

And there is more to that fiasco at the Revenues & Customs, apparently there is an email trail of someone in senior management at the R&C giving authority (permission) for the 7.2 million database of personal details to be sent via the post in a cost saving exercise. Now it is going to cost them even more money, I heard over £500,000 has been spent, and what about the cost to rifle through emails sent by individuals to gather all the evidence. If only they had Cryoserver, they would be able to conduct this investigation within a minute, and yet it is has been 6 weeks since the incidence came to the attention to the authorities and they don’t know who said what and when. I will keep you informed of any further news that might come to light over the coming weeks.

CIA and those back up tapes...

Don’t tell me you’re relying on the back-up tape for archiving! They can be easily destroyed, as can be seen in the recent CIA case. Also, as we are all aware back-up tapes are only snapshots in time, and don’t contain the full entire email story. Did you know that you can send / receive email during the day, delete the mails before you go home, and they will not be backed up. I was speaking with the compliance team at a major financial organisation recently, and the HR, Legal & the Compliance departments thought that IT was doing a back-up of the email system. They were shocked to hear from IT during the meeting, that they were having difficulty backing up the mail server and hadn’t backed it up for months! Common? And they are regulated! Safe to say they swiftly implemented the Cryoserver system, www.cryoserver.com and they can meet their regulatory compliance requirements. Thank God!

Welcome to the Cryoserver Blog

My name is Robin Bingeman and I live in London, England. Over the past year many people have been encouraging me to start writing a blog to capture and record in a single place email scandals. So here it is. To assist the reader, the purpose of this blog is to share stories with a wider audience about organisations getting it right and wrong with email archiving and compliance. During my day-to-day role as one of the Product Manager’s for the Cryoserver technology, the forensic archiving and email compliance solution www.cryoserver.com, I come across a lot of interesting and smoking gun stories through my job role. To the best of my abilities I will provide honest advice, to provide an independent review of various scenarios and provide clarity and advice. I can already see that this blog is going to become the online equivalent to Gordon Ramsay’s TV program called Kitchen Nightmare’s. This blog will expose the faults and failings of companies who have not implemented an email compliance and archiving solution to protect its own interests and assets. As with Kitchen Nightmare’s and the shouting that occurs through the hour long episode, the restaurant always has a remarkable turnaround by the end of Gordon’s 5 day visit. Let’s hope this blog can influence and turnaround peoples thinking to implementing a solution before it’s too late. You may never know your delay in making a decision could be the end of your organisation If I can persuade at least one organisation to invest in a proper email compliance solution, preferably a forensic one can only make this blog worthwhile.