Kieron's Blog
Email Archiving Demands Overwhelm Backup Alternative
One look at the numbers makes it clear that email archiving is still in its early stages. While most large enterprises have deployed first-generation solutions, the mid-market has yet to answer the call to email archiving even though all companies – from SMBs to the Fortune 500 – are subject to the same regulatory pressures and IT demands.
The most recent AIIM user survey reveals that 63 percent of organizations have little or no confidence that emails related to commitments and obligations made by themselves and their staff are recorded, complete and recoverable.
Meanwhile, 63 percent of respondents to a Storage Magazine survey report they’ve been asked to perform a legal or compliance request, with 73 percent recovering that data from backup tape (and 29 percent from backup disk).
But asked how confident they are that they could meet e-discovery requests, 47 percent of the Storage respondents are only “somewhat confident.” Ten percent are “not at all confident.” Still, 64 percent have made no technology purchases specifically for eDiscovery, even though the e-discovery process for relevant emails can take months.
As the Storage Magazine survey reveals, a request to find litigation-related email sends most IT departments to a collection of backup tapes, which are used to recreate inboxes and then searched for emails. The time and expense can be exorbitant, and the results are less than definitive.
The myth of email backup as an archive. Backup tapes (and disks) are not an archive. Rather, they are snapshots in time of everything that is on the email server at the time of the backups. Compared to an email archive, backup tape falls short in two ways. First, backup tapes don’t archive all email messages; and second, backup tapes slow down email retrieval.
An email archive automatically stores, indexes, and retrieves individual email messages and file attachments in real time. All inbound, outbound, and internal emails are archived, regardless of how long they live on the email server. If a user sent an email to a co-worker and minutes later, both users deleted all traces of that email, the email archive still retains a copy of that email. In contrast, backup tapes don’t maintain copies of emails exchanged between backups or retain copies of emails deleted by users after the backup is replaced with a newer one.
Better still, the email archive index makes it much easier to retrieve an email, because IT staff – and in some cases, end users – can search on parameters such as sender, recipient, subject line, date sent, etc. With backup tape, users have no corresponding search capability and must instead manually search for email.
Responding to the regulators. Increasingly, companies are falling directly or indirectly under the purview of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Sarbanes-Oxley, the U.S. Patriot Act, HIPAA, SEC rules, state laws, and corporate policies. These regulations often specify the retention period and the timely production of all relevant electronic documentation in response to litigation.
Companies depending on backup tape are rarely able to meet regulators’ demands for completeness or timeliness. In fact, AIIM asked its users, “If your organization was sued by a former customer or citizen, how long would it take to produce all of the information related to that person?” and 27 percent answered more than one month.
Of course, some organizations may never get involved in litigation, which would be ideal. Such companies might view email archiving as just an insurance policy – prudent but ultimately unneeded. A better view would be to look at email archiving as an information advantage.
Email archive and the information advantage. By some estimates, organizations store 75 percent of their intellectual property in electronic messages. email accounts for 97 percent of business communications, including emails for orders, which are accepted by 79 percent of businesses. Business users spend an average of 19 percent of their workday using email, and corporate email traffic will double by 2009, from 64.9 to 120 billion messages a day.
These numbers simply re-iterate the cornerstone role email plays in today’s organizations. And they suggest that companies expand their view of email archiving. More than insurance against non-compliance lawsuits or system crashes due to storage capacity shortfalls, an email archive is a gateway to a growing repository of organizational intelligence. In short, email archiving can provide a better understanding of the company, its customers, and its opportunities for growth and improvement. And that kind of revenue-generating point of view might just encourage more companies to embrace the email archiving advantage.
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