What does the typical user do in this situation? Most Microsoft Exchange users will simply archive some mail off their server and onto their own hard drive into what is known as a Personal Folder (a PST file). That's fine until the user leaves the company, or when he upgrades to a new version of Outlook or upgrades to a new PC. Then what happens to those archived files? How do you find and retrieve them? Do they contain sensitive information and can the archived files be searched?
Spam-drownings
"Users are drowning in the sea of mail, often spam," said Yusuf Goolamabbas, managing architect at Hong Kong-based messaging services company Outblaze.
Email eats up ever-increasing amounts of storage with inappropriate use of email through unnecessary responses, cc'ing of recipients and large file transfers. Add to this the regulatory demands and corporate policies being placed on email as a business record, and email management becomes ever more critical. "Complex retention policies lead to organizations having to retrofit [email management] to their legacy mail systems," said Goolamabbas, "or invest in complex migrations to tools which allow for better support."
Multiple drivers
According to Jeremy Burton, senior vice president of Symantec's Data Management Group, backup and archive operations have traditionally entailed copying data to tape and storing it in a safe place, usually offsite. The challenge now is that increasingly people are requesting recovery of that stored data. People are discovering that the archive is not always the best place to look for certain data as archives are typically not indexed well and have not been tended for years. "Many companies have found it insanely difficult to retrieve data when requested," said Burton.
He said that financial firm Morgan Stanley was recently asked by regulators to disclose some accounting information which they provided in full, or so they thought. After submission they found a stockpile of 1600 tapes with additional information for the regulators. Another recovery of tapes at a later stage uncovered further data for the regulators who decided Morgan Stanley was withholding information, thus woefully disregarding its obligation to produce all the requested information.
The risk of similar incidents is driving many companies including those here in Asia Pacific to address their email archiving policies and management tools.
Traditional backup and archive methods can help recall where data came from and the filenames of the data requested, but trying to recall a batch of emails relating to a specific transaction or project is beyond many email administrators.
Consistent policy enforcement
Another key issue: whose task is it to administer email archiving policies? Most organizations will have email administrators who manage everything associated with email. While it is up to these people to enforce and manage archiving operations, often they are not in charge of setting retention policy.
Then there are ongoing backup operations that are usually carried out by storage administrators. This operation is horizontal and right across the organization which means backups of email will occur in addition to archiving.
This is normal practice and acceptable for most organizations, but problems arise when the two operations are not aligned. If archived email is set to be deleted after six months, what happens to the backed up copy of the email?
Burton notes that this causes problems when the user or administrator thinks certain records have been deleted, but remain in the backup files. "Also, if you want to retrieve an email, do users go to the archiving guys or the backup guys?" asked Burton.
Backup versus archiving
Archiving and backup are two distinct and separate operations. Archiving files data no longer required for immediate access-backup enables speedy recovery of data in the event of data loss.
Given the similarities between the two operations, enterprises may be wondering if there is a point where they should meet. "Where is the touch point between archiving and backup?" Burton said.
The key to avoiding any risk exposure with the two operations is to set a clear and consistent email/data retention policy applied across the whole organization. "There needs to be a convergence of policy," said Burton, "plus a mechanism to alert all relevant parties when data should be retained or deleted."
KC Fung, director of technology solutions for EMC Hong Kong, agreed there needs to be a more centralized view of email backup and archiving.
"A lot of problems arise from individuals making their own archive files independent from email administrators and backup operations," Fung noted. "If your infrastructure does not store and manage email centrally, it's impossible to satisfy legal requests that might occur in future."
Tools for the job
To address the immediate burgeoning email problem, companies often throw more storage at the issue or simply restrict email inbox sizes. Typically IT will have multiple copies of the same email, one for archive, one for backup, plus one copy of what is known as a journal copy of the email. Journal copies are made to help indexing and searching. Backups of the journal are often also made.
Burton at Symantec believes to make storage of email more efficient there should be one copy of the data for each operation. He envisages two copies of the same data, one for primary immediate use and one for archiving/backup/journal use.
Symantec's latest technology features "commonality factoring" to help consolidate information or email within servers. This eliminates common blocks of data so that when backups are made, an administrator can flag already-copied blocks of data so that only new information is backed up. This consolidation dramatically reduces excess unnecessary storage, claimed Burton.
EMC also offers similar technology allowing for automated archiving and data compression as well as ensuring that there's only one copy of data for archive and backup purposes, said Fung.
Simplifying email
Both Symantec and EMC now provides tools which allow for archiving of email to less expensive non-primary disks while appearing to the user to be still "live" in their actual inbox rather than archived into another folder.
Such automated technology can help improve productivity and address the email management problems that users and administrators face, noted Fung. "According to our survey data," he added, "only 13 percent of enterprises in the region perform formal email archiving operations."
While compliance and legal discovery issues are driving some companies into email archiving tools, according to Burton, 60 percent in Asia and Europe are doing email archiving to address basic email management issues. "These guys want email to work faster, better and take up less storage," he said.
According to Gartner, the decision to archive e-mail is a corporate one, and IT departments must implement the tools and infrastructure to support the policy, not create its own. "IT departments must obtain clear, written policies from corporate compliance officers regarding e-mail retention and ensure that they comply with the corporate policy completely and thoroughly," stated a recent Gartner report on email archiving approaches.