Government agencies are subject to Freedom of Information Laws, and Venango County has no choice but to comply. Being prepared for inquiries about email is a challenge many administrators have to meet. Venango County, located in western Pennsylvania about halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, is ready for any citizen request.
Venango County residents — about 57,000 people across nine boroughs and 20 townships — can ask for information about an organization, business, investigation, historical event or incident; information about a third party; information about a deceased person; and information about themselves — and Venango County local government has to comply.
The Management Information Systems (MIS) department recently purchased C2C’s ArchiveOne Compliance, an archiving, retention and retrieval management application for Microsoft Exchange. ArchiveOne Compliance is designed to provide a full discovery and audit trail to organizations that need to comply with the vast array of country, government, industry and corporate rules and regulations for e-mail retention and retrieval.
Before ArchiveOne Compliance, Venango was backing up mailboxes to tapes nightly, and saving Friday’s tape for a month. “We needed to be able to have a copy of an e-mail for legal matters and could not retrieve the piece of mail,” explains Bill Kresinski, MIS Director. “Sometimes the mail had been deleted and we could not go back far enough on a backup tape.”
In addition, many of Venango’s Human Services departments — Area Agency on Aging, Children and Youth, Mental Health, Mental Retardation, Protective Services, Substance Abuse Programs and Veterans’ Office — are also subject to HIPAA (Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA, a privacy law that regulates access to personal information, explains how, when and why the departments may use and disclose a patient’s health information. Since information is often exchanged via e-mail, Venango needed an archiving solution they could trust.
“We have not had an official request to retrieve an e-mail for any specific purpose, but just knowing I can if needed helps a lot,” says Kresinski. “ArchiveOne Compliance has helped us reduce risk.”
By Guest Blogger: C2C Systems
