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WHO'S
MINDING THE MESSAGE STORE ?
Digital Imaging
- IMT Magazine (Issue 1 - 06)
By: Michelle Hope
Storage professionals are
fairly comfortable in the world of backups, remote replication, off-site
disaster recovery, and disk-based restore. However, comfort levels tend to
drop as talk turns to the company's e-mail management and archiving
strategy.
Everyone knows that the
message store, left unchecked, can quickly morph into something too large to
manage. Yet the issue of e-mail management is not just a storage problem. If
it were, most IT organizations would be comfortable just adding more
capacity and possibly archiving older e-mail messages onto lower-cost
storage devices.
E-mail archiving software
exists today to enable this type of functionality. The top of most analysts'
lists include EMC EmailXtender, Zantaz EAS, Symantec EnterpriseVault, the
Open Text LiveLink for e-mail suite, and iLumin Assentor Enterprise suite
(acquired by Computer Associates), to name just a few of the growing breed
of e-mail-related archival products.
Research also shows that
many IT organizations have already begun to embrace this type of
functionality. A recent survey commissioned by BridgeHead Software, a
storage management and archiving vendor, reported 66% of IT organizations
were already using software to perform some form of e-mail archiving.
But despite the headway
being made by IT, most storage professionals concede the answer to effective
e-mail management goes well beyond just adding more storage. Today, IT
professionals are being asked to join forces with their company's legal
department, compliance officer, records managers, and HR personnel in an
attempt to define the policies, procedures, and underlying technology
surrounding the proper management and disposition of e-mail.
The politics of e-mail
management
Most e-mail archiving vendors claim that the prospect of litigation, and the
need to produce e-mails in accordance with legal discovery requests, has
become a bigger driver than regulatory compliance for most companies
interested in e-mail archiving. According to Stewart Noyce, senior manager
of product marketing for EMC's EmailXtender, industries with a high-risk
profile for litigation, such as insurance, may require IT groups to process
as many as two to three new requests for legal discovery each day.
"They may have more than
1,000 incidents a year," says Noyce. "In a typical, large-scale insurance
organization, they take on the risk but must also manage the cost of that
risk [which includes litigation]."
That's one big reason
other groups outside of IT are also getting into the act and may even
spearhead e-mail management or archiving initiatives.
"The people who make the
choices about e-mail management and archiving solutions are usually the CFO
and compliance manager, the IT people, or the records managers," says Jens
Rabe, director of compliance solutions at Open Text, a content management
vendor that offers its LiveLink solutions for e-mail management and
archiving.
Other vendors make a
somewhat different distinction between the groups interested in e-mail
archiving. According to Nick Mehta, senior director of product management at
Symantec (which offers Veritas Enterprise Vault e-mail archiving and
management software), the interest in e-mail archiving often centers on one
of four drivers:
· Storage
optimization:
Typically led by storage managers trying to control the growth of
unstructured files and e-mail.
· E-mail
optimization:
Usually led by e-mail administrators responding to users' need to retain
e-mail for longer periods, but wanting a smarter way to manage the process
than instituting quotas or managing separate PST files.
· Retention
and discovery of e-mail:
Led by the legal department with an initiative to retain e-mail so that it
can be quickly produced in response to legal discovery requests.
· Compliance:
Led by a compliance officer interested in ensuring e-mail is retained
and able to be produced to internal or external auditors in accordance with
regulations.
"E-mail, storage, legal,
and compliance administrators all have to work together," says Mehta. "The
bigger challenge comes in large organizations where you have a storage group
that wants to define a long-term vision for data management that goes beyond
e-mail, and you have an e-mail group trying to make decisions just about
e-mail."
Different angles
How each group comes at the issue of e-mail archiving and management is very
different. IT teams may want to lighten the IT management burden by
offloading a large portion of the primary e-mail store to a searchable
archive located on a secondary storage system. Most archiving products allow
the end user's experience to remain relatively unchanged and may put a stub
or placeholder icon in the user's in-box next to an archived e-mail, which
allows the user to retain access to the e-mail.
IT groups are also
interested in features that let them perform rapid recovery of complete
message stores, as well as recovery of individual user mailboxes. Many are
also interested in solutions that allow users to perform their own e-mail
recovery.
According to Open Text's
Rabe, compliance officers or records management personnel see e-mail
archiving systems completely differently—as one that processes documents.
"They are not as interested in how the technical problems are solved, but
want to make sure there is a mechanism inside e-mail clients to
differentiate the important from the unimportant," says Rabe. They are more
concerned about how easily they can apply retention holds to key e-mail, or
how easy it is to index, search, or classify e-mail contents. This is also
where issues arise around how best to locate, search, or archive the
contents of various PST files scattered around the network.
Rabe categorizes the
various philosophies toward e-mail management as the difference between a
top-down, business process-centered approach and a bottom-up approach that
focuses more on infrastructure, speeds, and feeds. "Sometimes there's a
battle between records management and compliance officers. While this is
going on, IT can slip in the door and say, 'Let's start with archiving right
away, and then you can figure out these other issues later,' " Rabe
explains.
That's asking to building
an "infinite mailbox," he says, and will likely exacerbate the problem
later. "If you store e-mail for 10 years, who makes the call about whether
or not the e-mail needs to be thrown away?" asks Rabe.
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