Compliance falls into three major groupings:

• Regulation - Law: You will go to jail if you do not do…
• Standards - Industry recognised guidelines: You cannot join the club or reap the benefits if you do not do…
• Policy - Company rules: The organisation says you will do…

All of these compliance groups have various compliance topics, but as far as IT is concerned one common area is usually identified and that is “Backup” in its different aspect:

• Straightforward file backup - Can you recover if something is deleted or lost?
• E-Mail Archiving - Can you show all the E-Mails that were sent and received?
• Disaster Recovery - Can your systems come back?

File Backup

This area is orientated around what is backed up, how often it is backed up and can it be restored. Many policies talk about how long information has to be stored and length of time required to restore lost or damaged data.
 

E-Mail Archiving

This is a very hot topic that has been granted the status of regulation in many countries around the world. It is, for some organisations, a legal requirement to store, in a tamper-proof way, all E-Mails sent to and from the company.
 

Disaster Recovery

Although there are not many regulations about this topic it does very often become company policy that aspects of a company are resilient: This means will function no matter what happens. An example of this might be the company web site or the company E-Mail system. These two systems are often critical to a company and become policy that they are kept up and running even in the event of system failure.
 

Security

Security these days has to be taken seriously and sometimes for legal reasons. In recent years more and more regulations in many countries have come into affect, especially after the USA introduced several acts stating that an inadequacy to secure ones own company constitutes negligence and can be prosecuted against. Many universities were threatened with legal action based on this act after a series of Distributed Denial of Service attacks were launched from them.
Collax can help you achieve a good level of compliance by providing you with all the tools required to achieve a good level of security, backup/archiving and recovery.