FEATURE EDITORIAL

Business Critical Communications & Archiving

Earlier this year, Osterman Research conducted a report entitled Corporate Email Behavior. The findings reflect the reliance employees have upon email and how employee productivity is impacted by email. "The cost to a business from staff not being able to send and receive email and from not being able to instantly find old or lost email is growing exponentially," says Lee Trevena CEO of Synetek the sponsor of the survey. "Rapidly growing email volumes and its importance as a business-critical system results in real costs for companies when their employees can't transact or find their email." The

Tomorrow: e-Discovery in the News Webinar

Join Messaging News and Osterman Research along with three leading vendors, FaceTime, ArcMail Technology and Quest Software, on April 16, 2008 for an interactive Webinar about one of the hottest topics in messaging today, messaging e-Discovery. The Webinar will focus on the latest cases, decisions, and other issues and how it all applies to you.

Click here for all the details and to register.

research revealed that 93 percent of users said email was either important or critical in performing their job roles and that the average user said one out of every two emails received was critical or important to their immediate workload.

As this survey confirms, email is vital in terms of productivity and plays a central role in conducting business. Email has become the corporate memory in most cases, because it is the primary means for communications. The added language to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in December of 2006 regarding e-Discovery added yet another layer of importance for how email is managed. All of this leads to why email archiving is of growing importance. The market research firm Radicati Group noted recently that it expects the total email archiving marketplace to grow from $1.3 billion in 2007 to more than $6 billion by 2010.

Google tossed its hat into the archiving ring on March 31, when Product Marketing Manager Bill Kee announced that Google Message Discovery is now available. In a company blog, Kee notes that email archiving is different from email backup. He writes that archiving:

• "provides storage that automatically scales with need;
• captures all sent and received messages (backup systems merely take a snapshot of your mail storage at a certain time, say every night at midnight, and don't capture messages that may have been sent and then deleted in the meantime);
• allows specific policies to be set around message retention time periods; and
• allows authorized administrators to search across email for all users quickly."

According to Kee, "We see email archiving and security as a foundational element for helping businesses organize their information and make it accessible and useful. And now that we've made it available online (starting at $25 per user, per year) we look forward to helping organizations quickly take greater control over their email."

Google Message Discovery is included with Google Apps Premier Edition. The company notes that the product also supports other email systems, such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino.

Read more about archiving and e-Discovery, by reading the August cover story and attending this week's Webinar.

Email Archiving: Mistakes to Avoid

Speaking of email archiving, the recent disclosure from the White House, had me recalling words from Paul D'Arcy, VP of marketing for MessageOne, on archiving mistakes to avoid. For those not following the headlines, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University's National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005. A federal court had given the White House until March 21 to explain why it should not be forced to copy all its hard drives and other storage media that could contain copies of the millions of email messages that the two suing groups say have been lost.

In response, the White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an attempt to persuade U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola that the court proposed email recovery plan would be fruitless. In an earlier statement, the White House Office of Administration acknowledged it never completed work that began in 2003 on a planned records management and email archiving system. Seems the White House canceled the project in late 2006 and says it is still working on a new version. In the absence of a permanent archiving system, the White House has been archiving emails on White House servers since early in the administration. The most recent explanation in late March from the White House administrators is that as part of a "refresh program" that replaces one-third of the Executive Office of the President's workstations every year, it routinely destroys hard drives. Data from the retired systems is not necessarily kept, plus its practice of recycling (taping over existing data) on backup servers means that recovery of missing emails is unlikely. The White House is arguing that it would be "costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an email retrieval program" at this time, and that in all likelihood, the hard drives that might have contained email have by now been destroyed.

In D'Arcy's top five list, the second most common misconception is email archiving exposes me to risk. "Some companies believe that saving email is tantamount to keeping a smoking gun," writes D'Arcy. "Mistakenly believing that 'what I don't save, won't hurt me' is no more effective than closing your eyes to make a problem disappear. Implementing the shortest possible retention policies – typically 30 or 90 days – across the organization does not yield protection from the threat of litigation nor meet compliance requirements. While a message may be eliminated from corporate email servers, the probability is high that it lives on in the possession of the people who received or were copied on the email. Thus, deleting email with a short retention period policy can arm adversaries with critical information that doesn't exist in the company archive. At the very least, short retention periods increase the difficulty and cost of responding to e-Discovery requests." Clearly, the White House is an excellent example of the 'what I don't save won't hurt me' misconception.

As the Congressional committee hearing testimony progresses, it appears we may never locate the missing White House emails. In addition to the legal action, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, it has asked the FBI to investigate whether White House officials obstructed justice by allegedly destroying documents related to the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. A spokesperson for the FBI says the request is under review.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Messaging Newswire’s News & Trends in Email Security. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Stephanie Jordan. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

For marketing information on this newsletter or other Messaging News products contact jvictor@messagingnews.com