Email retention is a very important component in every company’s day to day business practices. The reasons are many: legal requirements, efficient use of storage, privacy of corporate email messages and others.

Policies and best practices should be clearly stated in every company’s IT department for how best to archive the multitude of emails that accumulate each day.

Here are some of the best practices and considerations for email archival.

1. Indexing and searching capability should be features of all email archival systems. Companies need to be able to respond quickly to requests for old emails particularly when those requests are coming from legal entities outside of the company. Months and months of email messages can quickly become millions of archived messages. IT departments will need to be able to respond to information requests in the least amount of time possible so as to meet any legal requirements necessary. Having a fully indexed archival message system will support the retrieval of any documents or email messages in a short period of time. In addition, being able to respond to requests for archived emails can help to meet discovery or subpoena requests in a timely manner.
2. Audit trails should be another component of any good email archival system. Companies need to secure and track their archived emails to meet the regulations of the various governing bodies such as the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) that can request specific emails from them. Audit trails can also be used to prove compliance with reporting regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
3. Complete email integrity needs to be maintained so as to meet the rules of evidentiary standards. Email integrity can be maintained by use of electronic signatures and time stamps of each email that is archived, redundancy of archival systems to provide continuous access to archived emails and encryption of email messages to protect against tampering of original data.
4. Virus scanning of all email messages prior to archival should be an additional step in the archival process so as to ensure not only the integrity of archived email messages but also the protection of email system at the time of retrieval of email messages from the archive system.
5. Support of multiple email systems and protocols is another feature that can help to reduce the number of archive systems that are needed within a corporation. Some of the more widely used email systems that ought to be included in an email archive system include: Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, First Class, standard POP3, SMTP and Imap protocols.
6. Administrators should coordinate with their in-house legal department and with the department managers of the various business units that the IT organization is responsible for supporting. Those department managers may have additional requirements for email archiving of their employees emails based on their applications used and types of businesses they engage in. And legal departments can also provide guidance in the necessary archival rules and regulations which the company as a whole must comply with.
7. Know what time periods are required by specific regulations when determining how long to keep email messages in the archives. Some companies do not routinely rotate their archived email messages out to the bit bucket and as expected continue to drive up their storage and administrative costs unnecessarily. The more email messages that are stored then the more indexes are required and longer search times than are necessary will occur.
8. Designate someone within the IT organization who is the interface to the legal department. In smaller organizations the legal department will most likely be an outside law firm. Schedule regular quarterly reviews of the laws and regulations specific to your industry that have mandates related to email retention requirements. Some of these compliance laws, regulations, and standards that can impact how email is retained include: the Federal E-Discovery Rules; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA); the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX); the PCI Data Security Standard; the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA); the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC; the Basel II Accord and others.
9. Although not considered email, instant messages should also be included as electronic items that can be stored in an email archival system. Within the course of daily activities business communication emails that are received can sometimes start off as instant messages that have been converted into email when the sender was no longer able to communicate with the recipient.
10. The implementation and execution of a good email archival system can save a company much valuable time and money when all contingencies have been taken into account and the planning has been done well.

Despite the benefits of giving users large electronic mailboxes, many administrators have been reluctant to do so because of the costs and complexity involved. However, those costs can be reduced and that complexity simplified making large mailboxes a more viable solution with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

That’s what Microsoft maintains in a recent white paper, “The Microsoft Large Mailbox Vision: Giving users large mailboxes without breaking your budget.” In the document, the company explains how new features in Exchange 2010 can reduce storage costs, as well as improve the operation of existing systems.

What’s wrong with small mailboxes? For one thing, they require user intervention to manage. Users are forced to make decisions on what should be saved, archived or deleted in order to stay within size limits. Not only do those decisions waste valuable time for users, but they can result in important organizational knowledge being trashed.

Faced with the prospect of reviewing an onerous number of emails, some users take shortcuts to avoid the burdensome task. One typical shortcut is dumping emails into .PST files. That creates a whole new set of problems. Universal access to the emails is lost because the files can be accessed only on the machines they were created on. If the files are corrupted, oftentimes there’s no way to recover the data in them. What’s more, since the files are outside the Exchange infrastructure, they can be difficult to search–a serious problem should an organization be hit with an electronic discovery order in a lawsuit.

One way Exchange can reduce the costs associated with larger mailboxes is by allowing organizations to substitute lower performance, higher capacity disk storage for high performance, lower capacity disks.

Continue reading Creating large mailboxes with Exchange 2010

IT managers must account for many demands on their time and resources. Storage is always an issue and having to estimate the growth needs of the company and all the various departments can be a time-consuming and sometimes thankless job.

Estimating email storage needs can be started by making assumptions about the average size in bytes that attachments will require, the hours of day that the email servers will be the busiest and the number of users per email server. Those three variables multiplied together are a good starting point in estimating how much storage to allocate for email servers.

And the same computations can also be used when estimating how much storage to allocate for archiving purposes.

Archiving email messages can save an IT data center in many ways. Some of the reasons for archiving email messages include:

Continue reading 7 Reasons for Email Archiving

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