Almost all organizations will archive and store email communications within the next 12 months. The majority (68 percent) already do so. Current and planned archiving for other types of communication are less widespread: one in three organizations now archive IM communications (31 percent), in spite of IMs widespread use. All told, about half of IT respondents will have IM storage in place within the next 12 months.

Large organizations are significantly more likely to have archiving and storage policies in place for Email and IM/chat. They are slightly more likely to have such policies for web conferencing. For audio conferencing archiving, company size has no impact.

Across all company sizes, it seem that archiving may be a function of when the communication method was rolled out across the network-hence email and IM are most likely to be archived compared with relatively newer communications methods.

Responsibility for archiving policies is typically a function of the CIO or the IT department at smaller organizations, while the legal department is more involved at larger companies. This raises a concern about the extent to which corporate archiving polices at small organizations have been subject to legal review.

Smaller companies typically lack the resources or capacity to reproduce employee communications if required to do so for legal reasons. Note for example that 67% of small companies (1 to 99 employees) cannot produce such communications.

Corporate Policies and Network Monitoring

Not surprisingly, larger organizations are much more likely to have corporate communications policies in place-although such policies are relatively widespread at all companies. (Note that across all company sizes, one in four companies - 23% - have no such policy).

Larger organizations are more likely to actively monitor and track employee communications and web usage, compared with the smallest companies. That said, the largest organizations still have a ways to go to insure security: Only 45 percent monitor IM communications. That’s much better than the 25 percent of the under-100 employee organizations that do so, but still leaves large companies remarkably open to a communications vector for which 50 percent of their employees identify IM as a risk.