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TechNote:
Email Archiving Solutions
Email Archiving - Enabling the Enterprise, Reducing Risk, Controlling Costs
Email is ubiquitous in business. It enables collaboration, it is flexible, reliable, fast, inexpensive, and widely accessible. However, it has unexpectedly become the default repository of operational and proprietary data. Over 60% of business-critical information is stored in messaging systems.
There are three primary drivers for implementing email archiving:
1. Enabling the Enterprise (Data Retention and Retrieval)
- Retention and retrieval are universal requirements for business data. However, email was never designed to be the general repository for corporate information that it has become. Messages are now accompanied by all manner of business-critical attachments, from PDF files, to images, to video, that are not easily classified.
- Email is personal in content and purpose, even if it is entirely focused, as it should be, on the business of the enterprise. Data is created, collaborated upon, used and stored according to the particular needs of the workers' individual job descriptions. Programs such as Outlook® encourage filing systems that are driven almost exclusively by the end-users' individual preferences.
- Systems for retrieval need to be immune to arbitrary deletion and seemingly chaotic classification, while allowing completely arbitrary searches across all messages and attachments throughout the organization, for as long as the data is needed. Some government organizations claim that this could be 100 years.
2. Reducing Risk (Regulatory Compliance)
- Retrieval is often driven by litigation and the associated discovery phase. Courts have become unsympathetic to claims that a particular piece of information is unavailable because of email system failures, the departure of an employee, or the loss of a laptop.
- We operate in a highly regulated business environment. HIPAA for health care providers, Sarbanes-Oxley for public companies, SEC and NASD for the financial industry, all combine to pose a need for compliance and related audits. We comply because we have to.
- The time frame for retrieval mandated by regulations can be challenging. Access to an inquiry has to be almost immediate and absolutely complete in order to be in compliance. The penalties for being out of compliance are substantial, and can occasionally include jail time.
3. Controlling Costs (Storage and Email Systems Management)
- Systems and storage management improvements can provide a satisfactory return on the investment in email archiving, regardless of the other drivers discussed above.
- Email systems are uniquely visible, and arguably the busiest data management systems in the organization. As email data stores grow, performance lags. It is no surprise that administrators adopt somewhat of a bunker mentality when systems fail and global productivity suffers.
- Administrators are conflicted in their attempts to impose quotas on expensive storage use, while at the same time discouraging email storage on end-users' workstations, and guaranteeing 100 percent up-time, perpetual data retention, and guaranteed retrieval.
- Archival systems reduce costs by improving system performance, lowering the cost of storage resources, improving the reliability of the mail server backup, shortening the time for retrieval (particularly important in legal discovery actions), automating indexing, and reducing softer costs such as lost opportunity costs, or administrative overhead incurred in message retrieval from off-site backup tapes.
Email Archival System Functions
- The basic function of the archival system includes the migration of messages and data from primary storage supporting the email server to less-expensive secondary storage, such as low-cost disk or tape. In place of the migrated data, a stub remains so that when a user clicks on the message, it is automatically returned to the primary store and accessible to the user.
- The migration is controlled by policies set by the administrator. Because the data store is minimized in size, storage costs are reduced, performance is enhanced, and the administrator is freed from managing quotas and retrieving older messages from tape backup.
- Email archival is now assumed to include full-text indexing, not only of the message itself, but also attachments from hundreds of applications. This application awareness and indexing capability ensures that searches are independent of the end-user cataloging preferences.
- Archival software also makes use of the fact that while many people may receive the same document (such as a company policy manual), only one copy will be retained and indexed. A reduction in storage space of up to 75% can be achieved by such "single-instance" storage policies.
- As part of a regulatory compliance plan, the archival systems should include a journaling capability that guarantees that every email, received or sent, and every data object that is stored on the server is captured at least once.
- An email archival system can be a stand-alone appliance, or part of a more general archival system that also captures and indexes files on file servers as part of a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system.
The criteria for selecting a system that allows for policy-based indexing and archival of emails and their attachments can be somewhat counter-intuitive. Generally, organizations take a multi-disciplinary route to determining the email archiving requirements, with inputs from financial and legal staffs, and risk management people to help define the requirements. InfraStor Technologies Corp. can work with your in-house team to select the appropriate system. Elements of the total solution include the archival and HSM software, and the associated hardware for secondary and/or tertiary storage.
Key Point Summary
Drivers for Email Archiving:
- Enabling the Enterprise: supporting ad hoc collaboration and data storage in email systems while maintaining data security.
- Risk Reduction: Regulatory requirements and legal precedents mandate the ability to retrieve all emails and attachments relating to an arbitrary subject in near real-time.
- Controlling Costs: Email archival can generate a healthy ROI based upon reduced costs for storage management and improved productivity alone, regardless of other benefits.
Email Archival Functions:
- Reduction of the size of the mail store for improved performance and reduced cost of storage
- Journaling for compliance
- Indexing of all email and attachments
- Migration of data to lower cost secondary or tertiary storage
- Single instance storage
- Automation through administrative policies
- Integration with general HSM systems