Bloomberg offers message archiving service

Ask most executives what are the greatest risks their business face, and it is a fair bet that few will answer “e-mail”. Yet as employees send ever greater volumes of e-mails and instant messages, the humble message is an area of increasing interest to regulators and lawyers, who know that such communications can be a trove of incriminating or embarrassing evidence.

Highly regulated companies, notably in financial services, have long been under instructions to keep e-mails, but as more high-profile lawsuits hinge on the evidence from “e-discovery”, from harassment lawsuits to insider trading cases, companies in other sectors are realising that they must find a way of storing, organising and retrieving messages.

“What’s changed in the last few years in a lot of organisations is that in addition to adopting message archiving for compliance, they are also using these tools to meet e-discovery requirements,” says Brian Hill of Forrester Consulting. Other industries, from carmakers to pharmaceutical companies, are rapidly adopting new message archiving services, he says.

Now Bloomberg, the financial data and news group, is looking to use the expertise gleaned from managing the messaging service on its familiar black terminals to tap that growing demand. Its experience shows the sheer scale of the challenge facing companies contemplating their message archiving options: Bloomberg’s 300,000 subscribers already send about 200m e-mail messages a day and 12m instant messages over what it calls the world’s largest private network.

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Source: Financial Times

By: Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson