Email Archiving Challenges
When retention periods change, do you have to re-architect?
Archiving systems can be expensive to implement and even more expensive to change. Vendors promise rapid deployment yet many installations require months of expensive professional services before becoming fully operational. Business practices and regulations concerning email retention periods continue to evolve, yet many systems require retention policy decisions be made before the archiving system is implemented. Most archiving systems are not flexible enough to accommodate changing needs without incurring huge additional costs.
The most difficult part of archiving is deciding how long data should be stored and making sure that it is retained and deleted according to that policy. Typically, these data retention period assumptions drive the storage system designs of email system architecture. As email dependency increased, retention periods have become longer, more stringent and more varied across different classes of employees and departments. Legal holds, increased compliance requirements for Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) rule changes, and the ongoing evolution of business practices are now requiring new retention period policies.
The costs to implement these changes often include upgrades, new hardware and licensing, consulting fees, professional services and increased maintenance costs. EMS Enterprise Archive has built-in flexible and granular retention policy engines that allow changes or Legal Holds at any time without the costs of difficult in-house modifications.
EMS™ on-demand services can provide virtually infinite mailboxes for any number of users and the costs associated with deploying and maintaining EMS are fully known upfront, requiring little or no initial investment, and have predictable monthly costs.
The court wants all of Bob’s email for 2005, we need to see it first
When email becomes evidence, is your e-Discovery search capability a competitive advantage or a liability? Finding the true extent of problem email in minutes gives management and counsel a real advantage and can save billions. Conversely, having to load tape to search and compile thousands of possible messages for manual review can cost millions of dollars, and more importantly, take several months to complete.
The horror stories associated with untimely email production in litigation abound. In Coleman Holdings, Inc. vs. Morgan Stanley & Co., failure to produce executive email in a timely fashion resulted in an order to pay $1.45 billion in punitive and compensatory damages. The sub-second search capabilities of the Dell MessageOne™ Email Archiving Services can search and find all email relevant to any discovery request in seconds.
With EMS you can perform complex searches across headers, body, subject, file names, and over 370 attachment types in seconds. Bounded search authority can be delegated to legal staff to eliminate the costly delays, common in alternative archiving solutions, that occur when counsel must repeatedly request and refine search criteria for execution by the IT staff. All aliases will also be searched since EMS integrates with Active Directory® to find all aliases and distribution lists for search and Legal Holds.
Storage costs and backup times are getting out-of-hand
Email usage continues to grow and the resulting performance drain on primary email systems and the inability of IT to maintain accurate and complete backups is becoming untenable in many organizations. EMS Enterprise Archive™ can reduce data stores by up to 80% and improve the performance of primary email systems.
EMS Enterprise Archive can provide users with virtually infinite mailboxes, while reducing backup times and email data storage costs. Unlike journaling and log-shipping solutions that generate high data volumes, only email for activated users is sent to the archive and that is single instanced and compressed to minimize storage and bandwidth requirements.
Administrators can set granular attachment stubbing policies based on size, age, and type and these policies can be set mailbox-by-mailbox, server-by-server, group-by-group, and user-by-user. When attachments are stubbed they are removed from the Exchange data store but still are accessible via the archive directly from the original message. This can data storage size by as much as 80%.
Personal accounts are hard to search
Outages pushing users to rogue email accounts? They do in most companies – 60 percent of employees reported using personal accounts when email is down in a recent Osterman Research study. The archiving problem is e-Discovery and compliance. How do you produce email that doesn’t exist in your archive, yet resides in your adversary’s inbox? You can’t. Your best solution is to provide an email system that eliminates email downtime. Users will not feel the need to use rogue accounts and your archive stays accurate and within company policy.
Combining either EMS Enterprise Archive or EMS Rapid Archive with EMS Email Continuity™ unifies storage for disaster recovery and archiving. Your organization gains a more accurate, tamper-proof, policy compliant archive without the costs and complexity of duplicate storage costs, multiple high-availability solutions, and having to manage systems with discrete, retention policy controls. The archive is always available and compliance policies are always working regardless of the availability of your local infrastructure and staff.
