Content Discovery: Put Away Your Fears

By Tom Schmidt

How important has email become for today's enterprises? To answer that question, Osterman Research conducted a survey earlier this year involving 92 Microsoft Exchange-enabled organizations. Osterman questioned these organizations about their backup and archiving practices, how they manage information, and the problems they face in managing information. Among the survey's findings:

• The typical user in a large organization sends or receives 85 emails each day, or more than 22,000 emails every year.
• The typical user in a large organization spends one-third of his or her workday doing something in an email application, such as checking email, looking for attachments, looking for contacts, managing tasks, etc.
• Users in large organizations sent 17% more email messages and received 25% more messages in January 2006 compared to just one year earlier.
• More than 25% of all storage in the average organization is devoted to email.
• 80% of organizations consider access to their organization's email system to be "important" or "extremely important" in the context of business continuity and disaster recovery.
• During the past three years, 74% of organizations have had to search through backup tapes because of a legal or HR request.
• 61% of organizations have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email.

Osterman's conclusion:

"The rapidly expanding use of email, in and of itself, represents a business and IT management problem by imposing additional demands on storage and bandwidth. However, the growing array of regulations related to records retention and the increasing proportion of business records contained in email, as well as the increasing propensity for courts to include email in legal discovery, mean that email management is becoming more difficult and more important."
 
Challenges to managing email
Any enterprise that wants to use email effectively for business purposes faces the following critical challenges:

Storage optimization There are several storage issues related to email. For example, with the number of emails being sent and received growing about 20% per year, it's no surprise that organizations are spending more each year on storage. Not only is this costly from the perspective of adding more storage to the network, but there is also the additional cost of managing this storage. In the Osterman Research survey, one in six organizations said that the size of their Exchange message store contributes significantly to the level of unplanned downtime that they experience. Another issue concerns email quotas. The Osterman survey found that nearly three in five organizations use mailbox quotas. However, this tends to shift the problem rather than resolve it. In general, email quotas affect user productivity, result in large numbers of support calls, and are one of the burdens of email management. Finally, the growing size of message stores means that it takes organizations longer to perform a backup. The Osterman survey found that, on average, it takes organizations four hours to perform a full backup of an Exchange server.

Legal retention and discovery The emergence of email as legal evidence is pressing companies to demonstrate that their data is not only secure from tampering, but also that specific information is quickly retrievable to support the legal discovery process. Simple records retention alone is insufficient to meet the standards for accessibility. The traditional way to restore required messages from backup tapes is a cost-prohibitive and time-consuming process. Manual tape restoration costs $2,000 to $5,000 per tape, resulting in total charges in typical litigation cases exceeding $200,000 per case. The widely publicized Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories Inc. case illustrates how the legal-discovery process tests the way many companies manage email and other documents. Wyeth and its sister company, A.H. Robins Inc., were sued over the weight-loss drug combination fen-phen. Although the plaintiff sought relevant email messages from only a few of the defendant's employees, the company's tape backup system couldn't easily isolate the required information without incurring considerable cost, estimated to be between $1.1 million and $1.7 million. Faced with the cost of email discovery, and the possibility of losing despite such an effort, Wyeth settled with the plaintiff.

Regulatory compliance While most organizations don't face the stringent requirements for the preservation of records imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission or the National Association of Securities Dealers, every organization in every industry faces some level of obligation to comply with regulations regarding the preservation of records. Expanding records retention periods create additional challenges to ensuring the security and availability of this information -- a common driver across regulations. The more there is to manage, the more challenges and risks are associated with ensuring the security and availability of this information. Moreover, retention periods vary from regulation to regulation. Without controls in place, there is no way to classify this information upfront and determine the appropriate retention period.

Flexible messaging archiving
The solution to the problems discussed above is a messaging archiving system. Using such a system, messaging content is captured as it enters the network or is sent between internal users, this content is indexed, and the information is placed into an archive where it is stored for long periods and also protected from tampering.
 
For an organization that receives a request for email due to a regulatory audit or legal discovery order, an archiving system makes the process easier and faster as opposed to recovering content from tape.

An archiving system can also significantly improve storage management. For example, an archiving system can use lower-cost storage for long-term retention of data, resulting in a lower overall cost of messaging-related storage. An archiving system can also automatically migrate mailbox content from live storage to an archive when, for example, a user's quota is nearly reached. This can result in users never running into mailbox quotas while allowing IT to maintain or even reduce the size of these quotas. In addition, backup windows can be shortened by reducing the amount of live storage on messaging servers.

Conclusion
Recent legal developments confirm rising expectations for enterprises to retain and produce email records. Many organizations find themselves mired in investigations and subsequent lawsuits as a result of the destruction and improper storage of email data.

Given this environment, the results of the Osterman Research survey shed light on the growing importance of an email archiving system for organizations of all sizes. An archiving system is a critical requirement because it can help an organization satisfy its data retention requirements, and optimize its email storage.

Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.