CONSIDERING AN ENTERPRISE VAULT FOR EMAIL ARCHIVING
By Adam Hensley
Consider that a vast amount of business today is done electronically. Now consider the
importance of electronic mail in that realm. According to Ferris Research, a San Francisco
research firm that specializes in messaging and collaborative technologies, the typical
number of email messages sent and received by the average business user is 600 per week.
With this in mind, companies need to look at developing an email-archiving/retention policy
that can help control and manage the unending flow of information by addressing regulatory
compliance, litigation readiness, productivity issues, and general business needs.
Many IT shops will try a common move by throwing more hardware and hard drive space at
the issue. In conjunction, they may enforce limits on mailbox sizes by applying space
quotas. While this can have its place, at times, it tends to just shift the problem from
one area to another. By having quotas on mailbox size, it forces users to keep their
accounts cleaned up by archiving the data to local Personal Folder (.PST) files, deleting
messages/attachments, saving them, or printing out items and filing them. This shifts the
issue from having system drive space problems and extended backup/restore times, to having
a, practically, full-time group of IT team to manage the issues surrounding the use of .PST
files as an enterprise archive solution. IT team are often called upon to help users manage,
retrieve, reinstall, repair, and search old .PST files for email. .PST files were never
meant to be used in this capacity and they are susceptible to corruption if they grow too
large, not to mention the extra time needed in ongoing user training to maintain the local
files. Also, since these files reside on a local PC they are generally not backed up by the
enterprise backup system so one needs to be concerned about the files being lost, deleted,
etc. during a rebuild or system replacement. Support of this type of configuration can cost
thousands of dollars per year in lost work hours. Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center figured that their staff time supporting .PST files before moving to
Enterprise Vault was costing the hospital $94,000 per year. Also keep in mind,
this kind of email management approach does not help companies address the ever increasing
need for e-discovery, litigation readiness, and regulatory/industry compliance for records
preservation. According to Osterman Research Inc., a market research firm based in Black
Diamond, Wash, forty-three percent of corporations have an email retention policy in place,
but only twelve percent use an archiving tool to manage retention and policy compliance.
Many businesses still operate under the misconception that backing up their data constitutes
an archive. Many also rely on the risky assumption that users correctly manage and save their
own business records. Using a system to manage compliance and retention policies for
archiving mail can help to reduce a business’ risk and avoid penalties which can be severe.
An enterprise archive vault system like Symantec Enterprise Vault, an industry leader in
Magic Quadrant reports by Gartner, frees users from quota and message size restrictions by
automating mailbox maintenance. Users should not have to worry about managing their own
archiving locally, as the system does it transparently to a central server based on rules
and policies set on the vault software. All archived items are still visible in Outlook and
identifiable only by a different icon showing they have been archived to the vault. Options
allow users to view the message or actually retrieve a copy from the vault. Since the
system is tightly integrated with Outlook, no additional end user training is needed.
Data is compressed and managed on its way to the vault, optimizing storage consumption
while not slowing down access to archived mail. For example, if a user sends an email to
10 users with a 5MB PowerPoint attachment, the vault will store that file only once, versus
the typical 10 times, and sets pointers to each of the 10 email messages. This helps reduce
backup windows and minimize hardware costs by saving drive space. System costs are also
reduced, as less expensive storage servers may be purchased, instead of continually adding
more expensive mail server quality systems.
If companies are currently using .PST files on users PCs, Enterprise Vault has an
optional .PST Migration tool to move archived data in .PST files to the vault as well. Using
an enterprise central archiving solution completely does away with the need for using .PST
files.
The tremendous growth in email, continuing evolution of e-discovery rules, and ever
increasing risk of legal issues for failure to preserve and produce email provide compelling
reasons for considering email management and archiving processes.
Email archiving is an important technical capability, and with a comparatively minor
up-front investment can help reduce operational, legal, and compliance risks.
If you would like more information on this topic and the services that Vitalize
Consulting Solutions, Inc. has to offer, please contact us at our Corporate Offices
610-444-1233 or vcs@getvitalized.com. We are also always available on our website
www.getvitalized.com.