Email Archival
In recent years, email archiving has received an increasing amount of attention. IT departments have to develop archiving plans and deploy archiving solutions. There are a number of options available and a dizzying array of archiving products to choose from. On top of all this are potential legal implications for failure to comply with various laws and their discovery provisions. Email archiving is a fact of life for a growing number of mail administrators, and there are no signs that this is likely to change.
So why is archiving such a big deal? Thanks to a veritable alphabet soup of new legislation (SOX, GLBA, and FOIA to name a few) any organization which fails to produce the required records is likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a large fine or settlement. Recent surveys have found that as high as 80% of legal discovery actions have requested email. However frightful a prospect this may be, there are other less dramatic reasons for archiving. Email is a critical resource for business, but it can become very difficult to maintain easy, quick access to this important source of information. Each organization has to make the decision how to store this information and for how long. Clearly any backup strategy which ignores email is incomplete, backup strategies for email often offers unique challenges. Easy, quick access to old messages, especially in the face of rapidly growing mail volumes, present a rather daunting problem to manage. Also in the face of greater compliance demands, IT administrators need to be able to enforce compliance. Though there are still some who require the end user to maintain the required email records, as the legal stakes are rising, this option is becoming far less viable. Managing and maintaining this information and ensuring its availability is also requiring greater resource investment in terms for both equipment and personnel. There are often great advantages to be gained by centralizing these email archives, thereby centralizing the storage and management process.
Once it is decided to implement archiving, there are a number of questions one has to ask. The first question is whether to go with a managed solution or to do everything in house. The next few questions are very much interrelated. Which vendor to go with, who will have access to the archives, where will the archives be stored, how long will mail stay on the server before it is archived. These are just some of the question one might ask next. These questions will depend on the circumstances of the organization and this is a large part of the reason why there are so many solutions available. If one chooses the managed approach, many of the management and maintenance details are simplified, but one still has to ensure that the provider is able to guarantee access and availability. Also the network infrastructure has to be able to handle the increased bandwidth requirements. If one goes with the in house option then configuration, management and maintenance become a concern, and this archive must be part of the disaster recovery plan.
There are trade-offs to each approach, but for small-to-medium size businesses with limited IT resources the hosted solution is often the better option. For large enterprise sized businesses, which usually have large IT budgets and available IT resources, the in house solution may be the better choice.
Growing numbers of mail administrators are facing the challenges of deploying email archiving. The needs of each organization determine the feature set the mail administrator must have. Careful consideration and planning must go into the final choice.
Tags: email archival solutions