Email Archiving Offers Proper Storage of Email

By Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale
in

The importance of archiving emails can be seen in various national headlines—email deletion at Boston’s City Hall against Massachusetts public records law comes to mind. Among many common sense reasons to archive emails are the myriad rules and regulations (depending on the industry) that govern its retention and recovery. Email also creates a historical record of every role in an organization. You probably don’t care to know what somebody had for lunch, but you may want the back-story on a current customer contract. Should an employee leave or be terminated, you would still have that information.

Despite the current Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and a continually growing list of data retention regulations, some organizations are unsure of what they should and should not be deleting. In many cases, they believe that email backup and email archiving are one in the same. “There is a lot of misinformation about the differences between archiving and backup,” says Aseem Asthana, product manager for Barracuda Message Archiver. “Many organizations are under the false impression that regular backup of their email server meets regulatory compliance and litigation management needs. The reality is that there are major differences between backup and archiving.”

Asthana explains that a backup system’s primary task is to save all information such that it can be restored when a disaster occurs, (either a major natural disaster, or a minor error created by a user). A backup system is not designed, however, to keep information available in near real-time or to save all emails. Emails that are deleted before a backup is scheduled are not saved, as in the case of Boston’s City Hall. The only way to get deleted items included in the backup would be to require the email server to keep deleted emails for an extra period of time to allow the backup system to catch up.

“This introduces two independent systems,” observes Asthana, “the email server and the backup system—to perform one task, email archiving.” Many organizations, he says, also incorrectly believe that email archiving is either too complex or too expensive. “None of those assumptions are correct. In today’s business environment, where access to information can be a differentiator, there is no reason for any organization not to take advantage of email archiving.”

Ryan Spier, vice president of sales for ArcMail Technology, points out, “An email system is not set up to be a filing cabinet. I’m a sports fan and I think of it as the quarterback of the data network. They’re meant to pass messages. They were never meant to be these repositories for all these files and attachments we put on them—pdfs, .xls, .doc, wav, etc. The backend database on those email systems will never get buffed-up enough. What can do that well? An email archive system. Not an email server. Let those things pass messages, that’s what they’re meant to do.”

While Microsoft Exchange appears to be the world’s most dominant email server, IBM’s Domino, Novell’s Groupwise, and Linux also occupy notable space in the market. All share the same purpose—sending and receiving data. All contribute to an organization’s ability to stay in business, and all should have an email archiving solution.

Productivity and Archiving

Nearly all archive vendors tout employee productivity as the main byproduct of their solution. Though statistics very on how much time is saved and saved by whom, looking for something always takes time. It’s akin to needing your car keys, but not knowing where you put them. Nick Mehta, CEO of LiveOffice, explains it this way, “Deleting or keeping an email seems like a wink-of-an-eye process, but productivity comes into play when end-users delete an email and then realize later that they actually need either the body of the email or the attachment. They end up spending time searching the inbox and other files for the email. When they can’t find the email, they contact their IT department. Then IT looks on the server for the message and if it’s not there—they have to start searching backup tapes.”

Asthana agrees that deciding which email to save and which to delete can be a problem. “A simple blanket approach of saving all emails doesn’t work, since it’s prohibitively expensive to run email infrastructure operations with an increasing amount of storage. Finally, and probably most importantly, if cost and performance weren’t a consideration, the real productivity impact comes from searching through emails via regular tools (e.g., Microsoft Outlook). It’s very time consuming. If users employ folders to structure their emails, then emails can be categorized incorrectly, (leading to a wild goose chase of looking for an email), and If an email has been accidentally deleted, there is no way to search for it.”

According to Josh Liang, VP of business development for MessageSolution, productivity claims have everything to do with the searching functionality on offer. He notes that there are three types of email keepers: long-term employees, sales people, (they keep emails forever as they never know which previous lead might come back and be a jackpot), and executives who won’t delete emails because of their role. He often sees people with 10 to 20 GB in their inbox. An archiving solution allows employees to find what they’re looking for immediately.

Mehta points out that searching emails isn’t just a personal issue—it’s quickly becoming a companywide need, which requires the ability to search across multiple mailboxes for HR, eDiscovery, compliance, and data loss prevention considerations. “With LiveOffice, all emails, IMs and attachments are stored and indexed in a central repository, authorized users can better enforce email usage policies, respond to legal discovery requests, prevent data loss and comply with federal and states regulations.”

The Future of Archiving

As with many other technologies, the future of archiving is, believes Liang, in the cloud. “The economy has really pushed the SaaS model. I personally believe that in the next five to 10 years, the SaaS model will take over more of the mid-sized market and when that happens, going to the cloud will follow naturally.”

Both Mehta and Spier believe that standardization is on the horizon. As companies migrate from one email solution to the next, organizations will need a standard archive solution that can integrate with whatever platform they are on at the time. Says Mehta, “A company today may run its email on-premises, but know in three years that they want to move to the cloud. If they start archiving in the cloud now, all of those messages will be accessible to approved users regardless of what platform they are now on or plan to move to in the future—it’s the ultimate flexibility. Our advice to every company is to start archiving now, especially if you are planning a migration.”

Published November 24, 2009