Where to Begin
According to Raghavan actual fines for not being able to produce data have ranged from US$15 million to US$1.45 billion. Clearly, it is time for organizations to have an archiving policy. "When customers come to us we typically find that they are in one or two places," reveals Raghavan. "Some are well prepared. They have gone to a law firm, and have a policy ready to go. At that point, we can show them how our product can enable those policies. The other set of customer comes to us and says 'what should we do?' We then recommend a number of organizations that we partner with, including system integrators, law firms and solution providers that can help them to define their policy."
Most experts agree that it takes a number of functional areas within an organization to develop archive policies. "Organizations need to quickly form a cross department team tasked to define a company wide policy for electronic information," suggests Spurzem. "They need to inventory existing data, its location, its age, the amount, etc. They need to inform IT of the need to preserve data that is involved in litigation. They need to investigate the retention rules for their industry. And the list goes on and on, but those are some basic beginning steps." Spurzem adds that firms like Contoural (www.contoural.com) specialize in helping organizations define policies.
Asked if an organization should attempt to populate an archive with old backups and imports of PST files, Lock says, "No, unless you are mandated to keep communications and have been remiss. You might be required to go find old stuff due to some litigation, in which case moving all that stuff into an archive will get it indexed and make it easier to find."
A service called Message Consolidation is expected to launch soon from Postini to address this very question. "With Message Consolidation customers will be able to provide us with older legacy disc and tape and we will be able to consolidate it into one place," reveals Raghavan. For now, his recommendation is to start the electronic archiving in one centralized place today, so going forward organizations have the information available. Once Message Consolidation becomes available, organizations could then add historical data to new archives, allowing for the data to all be located in one place. While archiving is important for e- Discovery, D'Arcy contends that it can be much more.
"Archive is really a tool to eliminate a bunch of risks around managing email. When organizations make the archive investment, there is a list of problems they should ensure the archive solution solves." D'Arcy's suggested list includes being able to manage retention and deletion and storage management. "Email volumes are increasing at an extremely rapid rate and the size of email data stores are increasing along with it. In particular with Exchange, there is a fixed amount of time that you can get messages in and out of the system. As a result, when you look at the amount of time to do maintenance, backup and recovery, you have a very large amount of data, which could take days." D'Arcy sees this as an example of email disaster recovery and archiving coming together. For many companies, it would take a week to rebuild their system and it would take equally as long to load it back into the environment. To combat this, organizations have put email quotas into place. "What storage management solutions do is essentially make the archive and the primary environment work more seamlessly together. After a certain amount of time, messages can migrate over to the archive and a stub is left behind. This is especially useful for emails with attachments. You can cut the size of your storage by 80 percent," says D'Arcy. "When a user browses through their mail, they can still see all the messages, but there will be a link to where the attachment is. They can click on the link and it will open, but instead of coming from the primary, it will be coming from the archive. This extends the user mailbox to make it infinitely larger."