Companies can have a lot of good reasons for not holding on to all of their old email, not the least of which is getting rid of content that might otherwise be requested through e-discovery. For regulated businesses, such as finance and healthcare, it can make particularly good sense to use technologies that make electronic messages vanish, writes David F. Carr in a column at Forbes.

TIP Capital, which provides financial backing for computer gear, uses software that enables it to send confidential peer-to-peer communications that disappear from a sender's computer once they're sent and from a receiver's computer once they're read.  According to the software vendor, VaporStream, the messages are not saved on an intermediary server, and they can't be forwarded or printed, Carr reports. 

TIP's healthcare customers are especially concerned about data confidentiality because of regulations stemming from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Only the company's managers and executives who are working on deals use the VaporStream software, Carr writes. While email can be encrypted to protect its confidentiality, technologies like VaporStream's ensure that it avoids being stored altogether.

For more:
- see David F. Carr's column at Forbes

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