Email backup & management issues
2009-05-22
For the original article in Processor, Click Here.
In The Age Of Compliance & Retention, Handling Email Is A Challenge For SMEs
- By Sandra Kay Miller
Regardless of an organization’s size or type of business, one facet of the data
center carries an equally critical importanceemail. The legal acceptance of
electronic communication has introduced new risks to those who fail to
effectively manage and back up their email systems.
“We find that oftentimes the biggest challenge is that administrators do not
always separate the need for data/systems backup (traditional backup) from email
backup, which has its own set of requirements,” says Aseem Asthana, product
manager for Barracuda’s Message Archiver (888/268-4772;
www.barracudanetworks.com).
There are a number of challenges unique to email backup and management that data
center managers must effectively address.
Retention Times
Determining how long to maintain email backups has been a moving target ever
since the Supreme Court ruled that email communications are the property of the
employer and not the employee. One of the key drivers for creating detailed
retention policies is regulatory compliance.
For example, email messages that contain information bound by compliance laws,
such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or Gramm-Leach-Bliley, dictate not only the time
period for retention but that the messages must also be securely stored so as to
protect any confidential or private information contained within.
Another consideration should be whether the information contained in the
messages is subject to particular laws’ statutes of limitations, especially in
the realm of civil litigation. For instance, a major retailer lost a personal
injury case against a truck driver because the retail giant had a two-year
records retention policy, but the statute of limitations for personal injury was
longer than two years. Had the company retained its records, it would have been
able to provide proof that the truck driver was at fault.
Asthana also pointed out that a blanket retention policy isn’t always necessary.
For example, he says, “Are there certain employees or departments whose email
needs to be saved for longer periods than others?”
Due to the various requirements for electronic message retention, IT departments
should work closely with legal council to determine archival times that best
meet their specific needs.
Dealing With Attachments
Along the same lines of discovery, storing and managing attachments to email
messages can pose similar challenges. According to Osterman Research, users send
and receive more than 23,000 emails in a typical work year, with 24% containing
attachments. Many message archives routinely strip off attachments or classify
messages for archive by content, attributes, and age.
Kevin Ogrodnik, president of Sherpa Software ( www.sherpasoftware.com), points
to another issue regarding the archiving of emails with attachments. “If one
person sends a large attachment to multiple recipients, storage requirements for
the same information can exponentially multiply.”
Choosing an email archival system that offers attachment management can
significantly cut storage space by as much as 40% through such features as
single instances, content discovery, and policy enforcement.
Capacity Planning
There’s no denying that storing data costs money. However, as storage costs
continue to fall and new technologies are delivering advanced archival methods,
many organizations have opted for a “save all forever” retention policy.
Unfortunately, this plan often results in terabytes of unwanted spam emails,
personal messages, confirmation receipts, and duplicate messages.
In order to maximize capacity for email archives, many organizations offer broad
guidelines to users for what types of messages should be saved and what should
be deleted.
Scott Whitney, vice president of product management for Mimosa Systems (
www.mimosasystems.com), points to
solutions that allow companies to automate the process for determining what
messages are saved and what gets deleted. “Companies need a way to structure
their email content for better access. By deploying a solution that can classify
messages, assign specific retention times, and destroy the information at the
end of its life cycle, storage capacity is better utilized.”
Preventing Performance Hits
“The increasing amount of email that needs to be backed up can cause traditional
backup processes to take longer periods of time, which can degrade overall
system performance or disrupt work time,” warns Asthana.
To overcome this type of backup bottleneck, email archival systems should be
isolated from traditional data backup systems. Automatically routing messages
and attachments into a separate storage location will help to maintain email
server performance.
Asthana explains that by turning to an email archiving solution, the storage
load on the email server is reduced by moving emails from costly,
transaction-based storage required for production email servers to less
expensive storage options while ensuring that email remains accessible to users
and administrators.
Overall, an effective email backup and management strategy has to take in a
number of considerations. A dedicated email archiving solution can help manage
the load on mail servers, as well as complement an organization’s traditional
data/systems backup strategy and can also assist organizations in satisfying
compliance and corporate policy considerations by ensuring that all email is
saved and that specific emails can be easily searched for and retrieved.
News and statements