Proofpoint Enterprise Archive: Retention/Legal Hold Management Policy
Proofpoint Enterprise Archive provides sophisticated policy-based email retention. In addition, to ensure that email messages relevant to a given legal matter are preserved beyond this period, legal holds can be imposed without the need to suspend the normal disposition process for all email messages.
Yes. Proofpoint Enterprise Archive lets customers define as many email retention policies as required, each of which has a set of classification rules to determine what it applies to. These email retention policy rules can consider the senders, recipients, content of the email message/attachment, existence of attachments of specific types and more. Each email message is evaluated against all email retention policies and the matching policy that would retain the message for the longest time is applied. A default email retention policy is applied if the message doesn't match the rules for any of the specific email retention policies.
Email retention periods can be defined in months or years. In addition if you don't know what your email retention period is, or if you need to keep content indefinitely, you can set the email retention period to "indefinite".
Proofpoint Enterprise Archive is built upon a read-only storage design. This requires that email messages be grouped into a set of items to be disposed of together at the point that they are added to the archive. This grouping is either based upon the date the message must be retained until (for email retention policies that define a specific retention period) or the month the message was added to the archive (for policies that mandate indefinite retention).
Messages archived according to an email retention policy with a defined retention period cannot be disposed of until their target disposition date has past. Messages archived according to an email retention policy that retains content indefinitely, can be disposed of whenever an authorized individual sees fit. Either way, a simple authorization with the user interface is required to ensure that you’ve had the opportunity to create necessary legal holds prior to disposition. Once disposed, the data cannot be restored.
You can change the definition of email retention policies at any time, but this change applies to new mail as it is archived. Existing content in the archive cannot be modified in any way, including changing its email retention period.
Proofpoint Enterprise Archive allows you to preserve relevant content by creating a copy of the data associated with a given legal matter. You can define as many of these email legal holds within the system, which appear as a separate logical repository. Legal hold management repositories are retained indefinitely and can be disposed whenever the matter is resolved. Proofpoint Enterprise Archive supports two types of legal holds: People-based and Ad-Hoc.
People-based legal holds automatically capture all existing mail for the relevant users. For ad-hoc legal holds, you can search for relevant content (using whatever criteria you wish) and add the results to the hold.
Yes. Both people-based and ad-hoc legal holds define identification rules that indicate which messages are relevant. As they are archived, messages are automatically added to all of the appropriate holds, based upon these rules.
People-based legal holds automatically manage content, adding content for users that are added, and disposing of content for users that are removed. The contents of an Ad-hoc hold do not update based upon changes in the rules. You can, however, search for additional items and add them to the hold. In either case, the updated rules will be used to capture new messages as they are archived.
A person with permissions to modify a legal hold can release it when the matter is resolved. This makes the data available for disposition. A user with appropriate rights can then authorize the disposition of the data.
People-based legal holds automatically capture all existing mail for the relevant users. For ad-hoc legal holds, you can search for relevant content (using whatever criteria you wish) and add the results to the hold.
A user with rights to search within the legal hold for legal email discovery can use all of the real-time search functions of Proofpoint Enterprise Archive within the legal hold. Discovery administrators have the option to search across all content in all legal holds. End users generally will not have access to legal hold content.
