That is the question that came to my mind when I was considering the career options of Exchange Server administrators.

I know that other IT professions carry varying degrees of complexity, but still wonder how often the email admin is the smartest person in the room.  Putting aside the ego behind that question there are definitely a lot of areas in which an email admin needs to have an understanding.

Let’s consider some of the technical skills that a good email admin needs.

Email Servers – often the email administrator is working in environments with more than one email server product in production.  Even those who only manage one server product will still encounter other products as they deal with outside parties, often trying to troubleshoot a mail delivery problem.

Operating Systems – the email admin is also usually responsible for the operating system running on the server.  Again in heterogeneous environments this may mean several different editions of Microsoft Windows as well as some form of Linux or Unix.

High Availability – larger environments often require high availability for their email systems.  This means the email admin needs to understand cluster, network load balancing, and the Exchange Server high availability features.

Firewalls – every email system needs to move data to and from the internet, so an understanding of firewalls from different vendors is necessary.

DNS – this plays an important role in several ways, not only the MX records but also concepts such as split DNS and how important reverse DNS is for delivery. Continue reading Are Email Admins the Smartest People in the Room?

Clark: "We hire attorneys for their IP and not their IT."

Electronic discovery has increased demands on storage systems, and that’s likely to continue.

According to Michael A. Clark, a managing director at EDDix LLC, an electronic discovery consulting firm, corporations with revenues greater than $1 billion is carrying around a caseload 150 active matters, 35 to 40 percent of which involve electronic discovery. With the new rules of Federal Civil Procedure adopted last December, he observed, “we’re going to see an ink blotting downward of electronic discovery to ever smaller matters.” He projects that within the next three years that 35 to 40 percent will move to 75 percent.

Finding information within the enterprise has always been a challenging task for legal ferrets, but those challenges have ballooned in recent times, according to Clark. “There are now not only more things to find, but more places to look for them than there had been before,” he said in a video interview posted at SearchStorage.com.

Finding information is a big challenge to operators of an enterprise network, but so too is deciding what should be stored and how long to store it, Clark noted.

“A number of corporations are devoting considerable resources to creating retention policies and then trying to enforce those policies,” he observed.

Continue reading E-discovery demands to double in three years

In-the-cloud storage got a setback last week when both HP’s and Yahoo’s online storage services were shut down for good. HP’s Upline has had a rocky past, with the young service having experienced numerous problems and delays, and reports of malfunction and inappropriate access. Of course, there is no shortage of other cloud vendors taking their place–and the ads are full of “Do you need an alternative to Upline” come-ons.

We’re still hearing rumors, and most recently, “confirmed rumors”, that Google’s Gdrive is ready to roll. Gdrive sounds revolutionary in design. It wil supposedly offer unlimited storage–allowing you to actually store the entire contents of your hard drive in the cloud. Local and online files are synchronized through a web interface so for example, you could start working on a project at the office, and then later on pick it up at an Internet cafe–or even on your smartphone. Gdrive will also be integrated with other Google applications and services. The security ramifications are immense though, and there’s as of yet no word as to how security would be provided. I’m not so sure I would want my entire hard drive replicated in the cloud. Also, it would seem doubtful that users who have to comply with various regulations regarding storage and backup would be able to take advantage of it, but we’ll wait to see on that one.

Before moving to an online backup environment, it would be important for a corporate user to review their data retention policy and any compliance requirements they face, and make a judgment as to whether in-the-cloud backup could adequately meet those policies and requirements.