The Copenhagen Compliance® Conference is now emerging as a European GRC Conference ‘Brand’. The organizers were pleased to note that there were participants from the rest of Scandinavia, and covering Europe with Iceland to the north and Spain to the south.

The focus of the conference was once again to re-establish the vital position Regulatory Compliance plays in the field of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) industry.The powerful speaker lineup contributed to refreshed GRC perspectives and insights. It was a success in information sharing and methodological sharing across borders and industries.

A summary of the conference is available here.

E-mail has now become one of the most important media for business communications. Customer Correspondence, contracting descriptions, contracts and land prices only in employees' e-mail inboxes.

In this newsletter we review in more detail the issues, legal requirements and functional demands you should be setting to your corporate archive in the unstructured and distributed world of electronic communication.

The majority of a company’s business-critical data is stored in email—data that impacts revenue, business decisions, corporate reputations and end-user productivity. With all of this at stake, it’s not surprising that email is subject to a growing range of legal, regulatory compliance, and business requirements. It’s also not surprising that email can cause serious storage issues for businesses.

In recent years, the archiving of email messages has become a business requirement driven by numerous federal and state regulations including Sarbanes-Oxley , SEC 17a 3-4, HIPAA, and NASD rules. With more than 10,000 regulations on data and record retention currently in force, very few businesses are exempt from some form of regulatory scrutiny.

Regulatory compliance, legal discovery and storage management issues are driving more organizations to consider email archiving. Here’s what you should know when making decisions about your organization’s use of email archiving technology.

Nearly every IT department has struggled with the issue of storage management for messaging servers. The pressure to increase storage limits continues to grow as the amount of email sent each day—as well as the size of messages and attachments—increases. This ever-increasing storage demand is driven in part by faster connection speeds, and partly by the fact that email’s role as a primary channel for corporate communication continues to expand. This growth is not expected to slow down in the near future; in fact, Radicati Research estimates that corporate email traffic will almost double between 2005 and 2009, going from 64.9 to 120 billion messages a day.

With special permission from The Economist Intelligence Unit, we provide you with The editor Ben Jones’ latest thoughts on what lies ahead for the world economy.