Ken Horner

In Part I of this discussion we talked about how e-mail is the major application for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and internally. However, healthcare organizations, given compliance and regulatory requirements, face challenges with regards to securing, retaining and accessing required e-mail over long periods of time. Last time we covered compliance and litigation support and automated email systems. Now we turn to the issues surrounding e-mail archiving migration and integration and how to future proof e-mail archiving solutions.

E-mail Archiving Migration and Integration

With the ever-changing nature of today’s business and regulatory environments, organizations can face new challenges that change their e-mail archiving requirements. Unfortunately, given their unique architectures and requirements, once these solutions are deployed it is nearly impossible to change or migrate from one system to another. This means that as an organization’s business, compliance or regulatory requirements change that they are forced into making their existing solution meet the new requirements. Merger and acquisition activities in the healthcare industry also create challenges in being able to integrate disparate archiving solutions to meet the requirements of the new organization. Fortunately, messaging platforms are available to help organizations change, migrate and integrate e-mail archiving solutions. Messaging platforms complement, not replace, e-mail archiving solutions and allow organizations to migrate to the solution that best meets their current business and regulatory requirements. They provide seamless migration from one system to another, allowing organizations to centrally manage and control disparate archiving solutions and provide more consistency for compliance, discovery and litigation support across disparate archiving solutions.

Today e-mail is a major vehicle for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and other constituents. Securely capturing and retaining host-based e-mail with an e-mail archiving solution is no longer good enough to meet business, compliance and regulatory requirements.

Future Proofing E-mail Archiving

The changing landscape of e-mail archiving and host-based e-mail systems, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, creates additional challenges when trying to map out a long-term e-mail archiving strategy. Many of the current e-mail archiving solutions require defined interfaces to the host e-mail systems to capture messages to archive. Over time these interfaces can be changed or disappear completely from the host e-mail systems. Such is the case with Microsoft’s Messaging Application Protocol Interface, or MAPI. MAPI has been a standard interface that many e-mail archiving solutions have designed their products around to capture messages that are generated and received by Exchange. Unfortunately, Microsoft has already announced that MAPI will be phased out in future releases of Exchange. This means that the existing e-mail archiving solutions designed around MAPI will need to be redesigned. Existing users of these solutions may need to plan for costly upgrades to software and infrastructure to ensure these systems will be able to support upcoming changes.

Forward-thinking organizations are beginning to realize that there is a different solution that reduces potential costs and risks around these future changes. These organizations are looking toward messaging platforms to extend their current e-mail archiving solutions by leveraging current standards, such as SMTP. This allows them to future proof their e-mail infrastructure by designing and deploying an archiving strategy today that will work with future environmental changes.

Closing the Gaps

Today e-mail is a major vehicle for healthcare organizations to communicate with members, partners and other constituents. Securely capturing and retaining host-based e-mail with an e-mail archiving solution is no longer good enough to meet business, compliance and regulatory requirements. Healthcare organizations need to consider a more centralized approach to helping them manage their messaging infrastructure that helps them close existing gaps in their e-mail archiving strategy. Messaging platforms help healthcare organizations to maintain compliance objectives while designing and deploying e-mail infrastructure that is designed future environmental changes. They also provide a greater level of control, visibility, manageability and extensibility to e-mail operations.