Guest Columnist: Paul D'Arcy, MessageOne, Inc.
Email Archiving: The Arm & Hammer of the IT Department
Remember the commercial for Arm & Hammer baking soda where they showed all the different ways it could be used? Buy one box and it was a common baking ingredient—but it could also freshen the refrigerator, clean stubborn stains from clothes, and even brush your teeth. Wouldn't it be useful for today's IT directors if they could apply the same formula for email storage—store once and use everywhere? With a new breed of archiving solutions, it is not only possible, but easy and extremely reliable as well.
The Email Problem
Today, many organizations store every email message in multiple places: the primary email server, in personal folder (.PST) files on the desktop, on backup disks and tapes, and in an email continuity system. Too often, email archiving only adds to this complexity—storing another copy of every message in a new data store.
With so many copies of messages floating around, managing email retention and controlling messaging costs becomes almost impossible. For example, it is very difficult to institute a holistic enterprise email retention policy that defines exactly when email is saved and purged. In addition, the proliferation of email significantly complicates e-discovery, which may require a company to produce all related email in its possession.
The Convergence of Archiving and Disaster Recovery
The good news is that the days of storing email messages three to six different times are over. New archiving solutions combine the key functions of email archive solutions (compliance, record retention, storage management, e-discovery, mailbox management) with essential disaster recovery capabilities (recovery and continuity). These solutions allow organizations to "store once, use everywhere"— eliminating the shortfalls of current mail architectures.
New archiving solutions address the past issues of archiving confusion and duplicity by providing a single store for continuity, recovery, compliance, discovery and storage management. Email messages are "touched" once and directed simultaneously to the primary email data store and the enterprise email archive. With one primary system of record for email, it is easy to enable enterprise policies, conduct legal searches and quickly respond to compliance-related requests.
Prevention Yields Strong Results
Once organizations have a centralized archive with all corporate email, companies have an additional level of protection from email data loss. Whenever mail is lost from the primary environment, due to a technical failure or an end-user's deletion, the lost messages can be easily recovered from the archive. New solutions automate the process of restoring lost email back into the primary environment after an outage or data store problem. This capability eliminates one of the greatest risks facing email administrators—the data loss window of tape-and disk-based backup solutions. It also offers full immunity from database corruption, Active Directory corruption and Windows viruses.
Fresh Ideas for Email Storage
With the tremendous increase and growing importance of corporate email, it is critical that organizations have reliable, easy and flexible ways to store and utilize email messages for myriad business and legal purposes. With new archiving solutions, the promise of storing once and using everywhere is a fresh new advancement that really cleans up email storage—almost as useful as the old Arm & Hammer baking soda. PD/MNP
About Paul D'Arcy
Paul D'Arcy is vice president of worldwide marketing for MessageOne (www.messageone.com) and an expert on email and crisis communication infrastructure. With more than 15 years of technology marketing experience, he is a published author and a frequent speaker at industry events. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Harvard Business School.