How email archiving policy impacts FoI requests

By accurately archiving email and having easy access to it, organisations can ensure that data privacy is maintained and records cannot be altered in the process.

CIOs need to be aware of changes to the enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act and how they manage email argues Andres Kohn of Proofpoint.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has pledged to take a tougher approach to (FoI) enforcement, but unless major changes in archival processes are made, this could be difficult to achieve.

Under the new measures, organisations will face action from the ICO if they regularly fail to issue a response on time, refuse to disclose information without specifying an exemption, or if they fail to respond to a request altogether.

Despite the fact that FoI requests can be a burden on an organisation, and perhaps even perceived negatively as a dirt-finding mission, the ICO rightly sees them as vital in building public trust.

As I see it, there are several major reasons behind the FoI bottlenecks. The first is that there is a often a lack of internal policies about how to deal with these requests, which are constantly growing in number, and the second is that data archives have usually been designed to store not to retrieve. They are not designed to be well indexed and easily searched, and as such retrieving data can be resource consuming and expensive.

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Source: cio.co.uk
By: Andres Kohn