The Story of Bacn
by Stephanie Jordan
Ready for another "right time, right place" story? By now almost everyone has heard of bacn. If not, Time Magazine has kindly offered assistance by placing the term as number eight in its Top 10 Buzzwords for 2007 list. In the listing Time's Gilbert Cruz defines bacn this way: "Similar to Internet spam, this term covers news alerts and other email that individuals signed up to receive but may never get around to actually reading. Much like the pork product it is named after, bacn is something we desire even though it clogs our (electronic) arteries. And like many techy terms, it is willfully misspelled. Bacn was coined in August at a gathering of new media experts dubbed PodCamp Pittsburgh. That's right—something hip started in Pittsburgh."
As the lore goes, on Saturday afternoon August 18, six individuals were talking as they loitered about the registration desk of an "unconference" attended by 250 people. Over the course of the conversation, the term bacn was spawned. Within days the bacn name became an Internet sensation with worldwide penetration. Many fellow geeks pooh-poohed the term, saying it would not be worth more than 15 minutes of fame. But making the pop culture Top 10 Buzzword list might be an indication that it will have some staying power.
Nothing New About Bacn
Ask anyone in the messaging space that deals with email management and they will tell you that Bacn is not a new phenomenon. "When we first heard the term Bacn it resonated with us immediately," says Shaun Wolfe, CEO of MessageGate. "We spend a lot of time with customers around categorization. The classification for email historically has been spam and then everything else all lumped together as ham." But these ham messages are not made equal. The default terminology was business vs. non-business, but according to Wolfe that always felt inadequate. "When the term bacn arrived on the scene, it made perfect sense." MessageGate has always talked to its customers about trying to classify business email. What is new is that more people understand the distinction. Wolfe says that the term has helped to short cut the conversation. "With spam, no one has to define and describe what that is. Now bacn is quickly becoming like that," believes Wolfe. "We do not have to try to describe that kind of email."
Given the rocket adoption of the term many agree with Wolfe. There needed to be something between obvious unwanted mail and business critical mail. Bacn is a quick easy term that can sum up that middle category. "There is business email that is not important email, or email that I like but do not need to read the moment it arrives. That is where bacn has really resonated," explains Wolfe. To help its customers, MessageGate offers analysis of messaging activity by taking a sampling of what is occurring on their network. "Our MessageGate Activity Profile (MAP) analysis has found that roughly 30 percent of emails can reasonably be classified as bacn."
In recent years email has become the communication tool of choice. So much so that today storage for all that email is becoming increasingly of concern. According to Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, today's mail servers are being overwhelmed with rapidly growing volumes of legitimate email. "The fundamental cause of the email storage problem is the evolution of email from merely a communications tool to a true business collaboration tool that allows people to exchange information quickly, sign contracts, approve transactions, receive orders, etc. In essence, email has become the de facto communications system and the de facto file transport mechanism in most organizations. As a result, more and larger files are being exchanged through email and often are stored in client, project or subject-specific folders for long periods of time," notes Osterman.
Classifying Email
To handle the ever-increasing volumes of mail, it is recommended that organizations identify the various kinds of "good" mail and create archiving policies around those classifications. Wolfe offers two reasons why organizations should categorize emails as they go to the archive— one is lifecycle management, and the other is simplicity of retrieval. To illustrate, Wolfe gives an example of a litigation request for discovery that requires all accounting department emails sent in the first quarter of 2002. "It is a more difficult task than people sometimes realize," says Wolfe. "You may not even know who was in the accounting department in 2002. It might require research to discover who was there, what their emails were, etc. Part of categorization is about adding (sometimes multiple) categories to an email, as it goes into the archive. All sorts of data can be added for lifecycle management."
This kind of sophisticated retrieval is relatively new, but is expected to become more widespread. Osterman notes that email storage is growing, on average, at 35 percent per year. "When asked about the most serious problems they face in managing messaging systems, decision makers have consistently reported that growth in email storage is their most serious problem—worse than spam, viruses and spyware," reveals Osterman.
"The whole notion of email categorization will be a hot area in the coming years," predicts Wolfe "While much time has been spent on inbound email—viruses and spam—which is absolutely necessary and the right place to start, it is important that companies realize they are at just as much, if not more, at risk for emails that leave their organizations or are stored by their organization and that realization is coming into play more and more."
The interest in bacn is perhaps related to the storage issue. The term is helping people to understand how to classify good mail. This in turn allows decisions to be made on how long an email needs to be kept. "Of the previously categorized business mail, maybe the bacn is kept for 90 days or a year and everything else is stored for seven years. Think about it, 30 percent of your non-spam email, over a multi-year period can be terabytes of information that you really do not need to store," states Wolfe. "Much of bacn can be identified with 100 percent accuracy. Network alerts, server downtime, Google alerts, newsletters and the like, all those things are 100 percent identifiable by software. That is a significant amount of storage and stuff getting in the way when you need to retrieve email or if you have to turn it over to legal for discovery purposes. This saves money, as organizations will not have to pay the $1.50 per email for legal counsel to sort through meaningless email."
Smart Archiving
When should an organization implement categorized archiving? Wolfe recommends that if a company is in a state of perpetual litigation that it may be worth the effort to go back and re-set their archive and categorize it, as well as put it on faster media. If companies are not in that situation, then Wolfe believes that going back through old archives is not worth it, but notes it should be implemented going forward. Wolfe points out that "people are just beginning to see the payoff of the last few years on archiving email. Organizations can anticipate what those savings will be, because they are seeing the retrieval expense today. Currently, it is very expensive to retrieve emails from two and three years ago, because the storage does not contain all the data needed to retrieve it accurately."
The rapid adoption of the name bacn is not much of a surprise. Using terms of the moment, even goofy ones like bacn, helps us to identify email types and allows for standard categorization. Something we need at the moment. "Fragmented email controls and governance policies, wasted archive capacity and inefficient network bandwidth are all symptoms of the inability to identify, classify and manage bacn," concludes Wolfe. "Companies must gain visibility within messaging networks and implement controls to manage messaging traffic and archives. Without better controls, IT department face increasing inefficiencies and e-discovery legal penalties—all largely due to an excess of bacn." SJ/TMP