Modern Journal Archiving for Compliance and Efficiency

What is “Email Journaling”?

Journaling refers to the process of recording all communications for company retention or archiving policies. It is typically used to comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

Key Features of Journaling:

• Regulatory Compliance: Ensures adherence to legal and corporate compliance policies.
• Data Integrity: Creates an exact copy of emails, including metadata.
• Storage Method: Emails are copied into a dedicated sandbox for secure storage.

History of Journaling

• Origin: Microsoft introduced the “Journal Mailbox” in the mid-90s.
• Purpose: Designed to meet SEC regulations for brokers and traders in the finance sector.
• Implementation: Initially developed for on-premise Exchange solutions, later evolving with cloud-based archiving needs.

What is the difference with “Email Archiving”?

The term ‘Archiving’ refers to the physical moving of files (email) from their native location, i.e., an Exchange server/Office 365, and storing them elsewhere for ongoing management, retrieval, and backup storage. Archiving is generally perceived to be a strategy of backup and restore in a Disaster Recovery Framework, whereas Journaling is more of an ongoing audit of communications.

Regulatory requirements launch journaling

To date, at least two government regulatory bodies, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), have specified a journaling strategy for electronic communications. Journaling ensures that an email conversation and string of metadata are captured immediately, registered for auditable purposes, and allows the organization to use these communications and immutable properties in a legally defensible position.

Litigation hold and journaling

Another reason companies utilize email journaling is for litigation purposes; when a lawsuit is filed (or anticipated), the companies affected are required to locate and place a litigation hold on all potentially relevant data in the expectation of a later eDiscovery order.

Office 365 and Journaling

If your company does journal email, the question you should ask is whether Office 365 archiving can work with journaling. The simple answer is no. Instead, Microsoft suggests using an on-premise or third-party cloud archive as the journal mailbox.

Workarounds and Their Drawbacks

Since Office 365 archiving doesn’t support journal capture, customers have devised many workarounds. These include utilizing shared mailboxes for journal data, “exploding” legacy journals, keeping your on-premise Exchange server active, and using a proprietary third-party journal archive vendor.

 Archive360’s Modern Archiving platform enables customers to onboard their legacy journal data and stream live journal data while keeping the journal contents completely intact with zero metadata loss or data conversion.

Benefits of Archive360’s Modern Archive 

Companies can now take advantage of their Azure tenancy to store and manage their legacy journal data as well as take live journal data from Office 365. With this solution, you no longer need to worry about being locked into a contract with a third-party vendor, managing additional issues with shared O365 mailboxes, or the extra expense of keeping an on-premise Exchange server active.