The Growing Importance of Email Archiving
by Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale
EDITOR'S NOTE: For more on email archiving, be sure to read Email Archiving: The Arm & Hammer of the IT Department.
A few years ago, as IT departments struggled with rapidly dwindling storage space, "purge and delete" became a popular corporate mantra. Mailboxes held storage quotas, some appallingly small. Very little was needed to push a mailbox over its limit. In response, IT issued the standard message, "Please delete some email. Do not use your inbox as a storage device." Unfortunately, larger mailbox quotas were reserved only for upper management.
Often there is anxiety associated with freeing up mailbox space. When applied to information, the term "important" is subjective. The cautious ones would move emails from the mailbox to the hard drive—a time-consuming process that could make the email difficult to locate again. An alternate course was to print email. Stuffed into manila folders, emails were organized by date, topic, or (commonly) not at all— resulting in correspondence and reference documents in boxes, recycle bins and desk drawers.
Employees don't want to be limited when it comes to saving email; readily available information saves time and energy. Manually deleting email is time consuming and unproductive. But is it feasible or cost effective to store 100 percent of everyone's email on the mail server or secondary device storage?
"An email archiving solution should improve access to information—not make it more difficult," says Chris Tebo, chief technology officer of Fortiva, Inc. "By giving end-users easy access to their archived email, tighter quotas can be enforced within the email system, reducing the number of messages on the email server."
Today's Key Business Drivers
Email is the most popular and ubiquitous means of business communication—containing a wealth of proprietary, sensitive, and possibly damaging data. For Enron, purge and delete was a tactic for avoiding incarceration. Ultimately, the failure of their business and subsequent malfeasance ushered in a new paradigm of federal and local government email retention requirements. Today, as a result, IT has to figure out how to save more email. Ontario-based Fortiva believes there are three primary business drivers behind email archiving: regulatory compliance; e-discovery; and storage management and productivity.
Regulatory Compliance
Calling for email retention and protection, existing regulations treat email and instant messaging communications as equal to paper-based documentation. Federal mandates are beginning to focus on the speed, accessibility and easy retrieval of emails—a similar important theme in ediscovery.
E-Discovery
Access to email content is a standard request in corporate litigation. At some juncture, every organization faces legal action. The collection of email evidence is a crucial part of the process. Lack of a proper email archive system means that information can be difficult and timeconsuming to locate—incurring court fines and delays in settlement. Emerging case law and more stringent regulations have made archival efficiency a primary motiva tor for implementing technology solutions.
Storage Management and Productivity
Best practices, fear of litigious consequences and regulatory requirements underscore the need for email storage. However, it is both cost and resource prohibitive for organizations to keep vast amounts of email on their mail server and primary data stores. Email storage takes up valuable server space, impacting the performance and availability of the mail server—while increasing data backup costs. The wholesale storage of email results in an enormous mass of uncategorized data, of which a large percent is 'junk mail' (such as spam), one line replies and no-point exchanges (like a cc or FYI message).
Managed Solutions Offer Options
These business drivers necessitate the implementation of an accessible, searchable, and secure email archiving solution. EVault (a provider of online backup and recovery solutions, based in Emeryville, CA) estimates the average corporate email account sends and receives about 14 MB of data per day, increasing the burden on both end-users and corporate storage requirements. The parallel growth in email attachment size only adds to this situation's complexity.
IT organizations are challenged with choosing the most costeffective and efficient means of email archiving, from an overwhelming array of vendor solutions. In addition to meeting both operational and regulatory objectives, organizations must factor individual departmental needs (such as legal, finance and human resources) into the overall corporate retention strategy. When deciding on an archiving solution, an organization should examine what type of solution best meets their corporate, compliance, liability and disaster recovery requirements.
Data longevity and integrity are often of primary concern. One reason managed solutions are growing in popularity is the additional level of assurance they provide against data loss—due to events such as manmade or natural disasters, system failures and internal security breaches. "With most email archiving solutions, users have no way of knowing if data has been corrupted after prolonged periods of storage," states Tebo. "Customers should be assured that the data is there, when and if needed, even if it's seven years later or more." Managed solutions also remove the burden from IT by supplying the physical resources and assets necessary for storing and archiving vast amounts of data.
EVault ProMail is a managed service that captures, monitors, and archives email and instant messaging. EVault is differentiated by the fact that it offers a completely online, Web-based solution that requires neither purchase of software nor hardware—and little to no IT resources for deployment. Employing an intuitive interface, ProMail allows users to retain email and attachments for the mandated period of time, and provides notification when rules may be violated. To further help reduce the monthly costs associated with large archives, ProMail also provides organizations with offline DVD storage capabilities.
Another option is Fortiva's managed, scalable, archiving and compliance solutions that offer low overhead costs and full technical support. Due to its unique hybrid setup, Fortiva's Archiving and Compliance Suite differentiates itself by providing a level of security, integration and flexibility typically available only in a software solution. Fortiva provides an appliance that resides inside the customer's firewall, integrating directly with the customer's Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory servers for easy set-up and management. The appliance sits between the customer's network and Fortiva's managed infrastructure, where all archived data is stored. The company also offers a solution called DoubleBlind Encryption. While Fortiva maintains the archived data, the customer retains the only copy of the encryption keys—providing full search and discovery capabilities whenever needed, but protecting against third party visibility. Fortiva notes that this level of protection can indemnify against any third-party access to a company's data, meeting privacy laws and protecting organizations in the event of a lawsuit.
There is no single out-of-the-box solution that fits every organization's compliance and archiving requirements. Today, email archiving is an ongoing and evolutionary process tied directly to individual company needs, current and emerging regulations, as well as security and liability concerns. MB/MNP