A couple of previous corporate situations in France and Japan highlight the importance for companies to implement archiving systems. Email is the primary communication source for companies being able to track historical information. With both the Kerviel-Société Générale and Livedoor scandals, employee email and instant message archived records were critical to the companies as the scandals unfolded. This included executive communications, as well.

Both situations are reminders that these days electronic messages are a constant way of life for all business professionals. For company self preservation, it is important to keep track of commitments employees have made or have not been making on behalf of the organization. This is where archiving systems facilitate in maintaining message communications, while protecting a company’s business  interests.  As innovative new technologies, like the iPhone, move messaging outside the constraints of the traditional corporate IT infrastructure, an organization must strive to capture all instances of employees’ business related messages. This requires that archiving be taken out of employee’s hands.

Continue reading Archiving is Insurance against eBlackmail

Backing up and archiving email and other data in the cloud has become popular as a low-cost alternative, and there are plenty of cloud storage providers out there trying to get your business. And the argument about low cost and low maintenance is compelling. With Google, Microsoft, and Amazon getting into the cloud business, it’s gotten quite mainstream.

But a recent article on Network World pointed out that cloud computing vendors are still seeing problems and loss of data–most recently, cloud storage provider Carbonite filed suit last week against a hardware vendor claiming that their equipment caused backup failures two years ago. And they’re not the only one, there are plenty of stories out there about hosted sites either losing data or temporarily going down.

And so it is appropriate to stop and think about whether storage in the cloud really is a good idea–especially for sensitive applications like email, which may contain valuable corporate data or may be subject to regulatory controls regarding archiving. And, the cost argument is only valid if you look at it in the short-term. Granted, most companies today are decidedly short-term in their calculations, but I’ve never seen that as a particularly good thing.

Although we take email for granted, the use of email can easily get out of control for administrators. People rarely walk down to another office to have a discussion or idea exchange.  Writing an email that can be sent to multiple people with attachments slowly uses up massive amounts of hard disk space.

For any organization, this massive storage usage creeps up.  Savvy administrators keep an eye on these behind-the-scene scenarios that create this creeping storage nightmare:

• People are trying to maintain their position by copying everybody who’s anybody, which duplicates emails.
• People have that “pack rat” mentality and keep years worth of emails within folders. This includes the document attachments.
• Email box quotas attempt to manage disk space, but many staff find a way to circumvent this process to get approval to have their quota increased.
• The IT department gets tagged for managing high I/O hardware processing, whiling balancing backup storage costs.
• Let’s not forget the IT department’s added burden of trying to control bulging email data stores.

Continue reading Tips for controlling your archive storage system

Earlier I wrote about Backup and Recovery considerations for email administrators in an enterprise environment and the need for establishing a well defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO). And I related that it has been estimated that 40 percent of recoveries fail. If you’re using tape for your backups and recoveries then you have probably already noticed that it can sometimes take hours to fully restore your email backups to your required point in time established by your specified RTO.

An alternative to using traditional tape backups for your email servers is to instead write your backups to disk. Data recovery is usually much faster when using disk technology as opposed to tape. But you still need a well written backup and recovery procedure.

Even if your backup and recovery procedure is well planned and thought out you can still have problems during implementation. Procedures that have too many dependencies or complexities are more prone to errors. Most often backups must be initiated after hours so as to avoid impacting a running production environment.

Continue reading Backing Up Email to Disk

The storage of very large volumes of email represents both an asset and a liability. There are powerful reasons for accessing stored email messages. This can include compliance with laws and regulations that require long retention periods and supervision of email. Some of these regulations might require consideration of SEC Rule 17a-4 or NASD Conduct Rule 3010, as well as the corporate governance recommendations established by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Government agencies, too, must archive email messages to comply with regulations set by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Patriot Act, and other Federal and State legislative acts. For example, the laws in Florida grant state citizens the right to request copies of all public records. Those public records that must be made available can include email.  People must also receive the requested information in a timely manner. Failure to comply exposes Florida state agencies to lawsuits. Many organizations can potentially encounter the possibility of civil litigation. This resulting legal action will usually include demands for copies of archived email messages and all accompanying attachments.

Continue reading Balancing Regulation Compliance with Archiving Strategy Costs