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An Osterman Research White Paper
Published January 2008
Executive Summary
Should you archive your organization’s email content? Consider the following: • According to the American Management Association, 24% of companies have
experienced their employees’ email being subpoenaed and 15% have gone to court because of lawsuits brought on by their employees’ email.
• In September 2007, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced Morgan Stanley would pay $9.5 million to two sets of customers that made claims against the company, and would pay $3 million for not providing email and supervisory content.
• Best Buy filed suit against Developers Diversified Realty (DDR) and demanded electronic documents, including emails, from DDR’s backup system. Although DDR argued that the content would be difficult to produce, the court ordered production of the requested information within 28 days of the order. Law.com estimated the total cost of just the production itself at $500,000 – a cost of more than $1,400 per tape. • In June 2005 AMD filed suit against Intel and requested that email for a small number
of Intel employees be preserved. The Intel employees in question were to copy the requested email to their hard drives. However, some employees did not follow
instructions properly, resulting in the loss of email that should have been part of the discovery effort over a period of more than three months. The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel has spent $3.3 million to process tapes to recover the necessary emails.
• Email storage is growing at an average rate of 35% annually – three out of five decision makers cite the growth of messaging storage as their leading messaging-related
problem.
Messaging archiving can help organizations to solve all of these problems and can satisfy a wide range of legal compliance, regulatory, storage management, knowledge management and other problems. Further, messaging archiving will, in most cases, reduce the risk from non-compliance with legal or regulatory obligations, reduce overall storage costs and will retain corporate ‘memory’ stored in messaging systems.
This white paper discusses the several reasons to implement a messaging archiving system and provides an overview of ten vendors whose offerings are focused squarely on the archiving space.
The court ordered
Reasons to Deploy Messaging Archiving Capabilities
There are a variety of reasons to deploy messaging archiving, any one of which can often justify the entire cost of the archiving capability.LEGAL COMPLIANCE
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are, arguably, the most important single reason for organizations to deploy a messaging archiving capability. The FRCP are a body of rules focused on governing court procedures for managing civil suits in the United States district courts. While the United States Supreme Court is responsible for promulgating the FRCP, the United States Congress must approve these rules and any changes made to them.
A number of important and substantive revisions to the FRCP went into effect on
December 1, 2006. These changes represented several years of debate at various levels and will have a significant impact on electronic discovery and the management of electronic data within organizations that operate in the United States. In a nutshell, the changes to the FRCP require organizations to manage their data in such a way that this data can be produced in a timely and complete manner when necessary, such as during legal discovery proceedings. The new amendments codified Electronically Stored
Information (ESI), effectively making electronic data more important in the context of legal discovery and litigation in general.
Email contains a growing proportion of business records that must be preserved for long periods. Further, email is increasingly requested during discovery proceedings because of the FRCP and related issues. As a result, it is critical that email be made available for legal discovery purposes.
LEGAL HOLDS
When a hold on data is required, it is imperative that an organization immediately be able to begin preserving all relevant data, such as all email sent from senior managers to specific individuals or clients. An archiving system allows organizations to immediately place a hold on data when requested by a court or on the advice of legal counsel. If an organization is not able to adequately place a hold on data when required, it can encounter a variety of serious consequences, ranging from embarrassment to serious legal sanctions or fines. Litigants that fail to preserve email properly are subject to a wide variety of consequences, including brand damage, additional costs for third-parties to review or search for data, court sanctions, directed verdicts or instructions to a jury that it can view a defendant’s failure to produce data as evidence of culpability.
The new amendments to
the FRCP are, arguably, the
most important single
PRE-LITIGATION INTERNAL REVIEW
Another important reason to deploy an archiving system that provides easy and rapid access to email data is to allow various groups to conduct a pre-litigation review of internal data prior to the commencement of a legal action. For example, if an organization
anticipates that it might be involved in a legal action of some sort, it can conduct an internal investigation to determine if the action might have merit. Doing so will permit senior managers, legal counsel and others to make better assessments and, in some cases, settle a legal action early, avoiding significant and unnecessary legal expenses.
OTHER LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS
A leading analyst firm is of the opinion that archiving for legal reasons before the fact is not necessary. Their philosophy is that a thorough search of all corporate data repositories
after the fact will generate the
necessary documents for legal discovery, for pre-litigation internal review, etc. However, Osterman Research strongly disagrees with this approach for two reasons:
• In the absence of a robust archiving capability, email and other business records can be lost, most often through
inadvertent disposal of content that should have been saved. This can result in serious adverse consequences for an organization that is involved in a legal action.
• Depending solely on corporate mandates or policies to save content will often result in less-than-complete compliance with these policies. Individual users will interpret policies differently, they will mistakenly discard content that should have been saved, and so forth.
In short, a failure to properly archive messaging and other content exposes an organization to unnecessary legal risks. Conducting a search for data in a reactive fashion will not mitigate these risks.
REDUCING THE IMPACT OF STORAGE
Several Osterman Research surveys over the past two years have clearly demonstrated that growth in messaging storage is the most critical messaging-related problem faced by administrators: roughly 60% of decision-makers cite growth in messaging storage as a serious or very serious problem. Messaging storage, driven by increasing use of email, larger attachments and the like, is growing at an average of 35% annually. This means that a terabyte of storage today will swell to nearly 2.5 terabytes in just three years.
By implementing a properly configured messaging archiving system that replaces messages and attachments with much smaller stubs pointing to stored content in an archive,
organizations can dramatically reduce the amount of content stored on ‘live’ messaging servers. This carries with it a number of important benefits:
• Lower cost of storage
By migrating data from storage on messaging servers to archival storage, overall storage costs can be reduced, significantly in some cases.
• Improved messaging server performance
If the amount of content can be reduced on messaging servers, performance can typically be improved as measured by message delivery time, the size of message queues and other metrics. In fact, the ability to offload messaging server data is the leading way to improve messaging server performance – some companies are using their archiving system to enforce rigorous inbox quotas, such as limiting content stored on servers to no more than 30 days worth of content.
• More rapid recovery from
downtime incidents
In general, the less content that a messaging server contains, the faster it can be restored from backups following a server crash, an application upgrade or patch gone awry, and so forth. The use of an archiving system to minimize the amount of content stored on live servers can dramatically speed the server recovery process.
REGULATORY COMPLIANCE
Industries that are heavily regulated, such as broker-dealers or healthcare companies, must meet a variety of statutory requirements with regard to records retention. For example, the SEC imposes requirements on broker-dealers to preserve email and instant messaging communications and to monitor these communications.
However, virtually all organizations must satisfy statutory records retention requirements, including broad-based requirements such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act impacts all public companies and has been a prime point for regulatory compliance. A few of the many state and other requirements are shown below:
• SEC 17a • FINRA 3010 • FDIC Advisory
• Investment Advisors Act of 1940 (hedge funds) • Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
• IDA 29.7
• FDA 21 CFR Part 11 • OCC Advisory • HIPAA
• Financial Modernization Act 1999
Virtually all organizations
must satisfy statutory
records retention
• Medicare Conditions of Participation • Fair Labor Standards Act
• Americans with Disabilities Act • Toxic Substances Control Act • UK Data Protection Act • UK Companies Act
• UK Company Law Reform Bill - Electronic Communications • UK Combined Code on Corporate Governance 2003 • UK Human Rights Act
• UK Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 • Basel II
• Markets in Financial Instruments Directive Although many records retention
requirements do not impose specific requirements on email or instant messages, Osterman Research has found that approximately 80% of enterprises use email for closing orders or performing other types of business transactions. As a result, email is housing a greater proportion of corporate and other records and so
increasingly is subject to statutory records retention requirements.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
The value of preserving corporate knowledge stored in email is undervalued in many organizations. However, email contains roughly three-quarters of the information that individuals use on a daily basis, and a large proportion of corporate email users spend more than two hours per day generating and using content stored in email systems. As a result, an enormous amount of corporate ‘memory’ is stored in email, making its
preservation important. An organization that does not preserve its email content adequately risks the loss of information that it has paid employees to produce.
Important Factors to Consider When Selecting an
Archiving System
DELIVERY MODELS
There are three basic methods for deploying a messaging archiving system:
• Software installed on in-house servers and managed with in-house IT personnel The advantages of this approach are that it can be the least expensive option of the three noted here, particularly for large organizations, it provides a significant amount of flexibility and it allows an organization to re-use existing hardware. The disadvantage
The value of preserving
corporate knowledge that is
stored in email systems is
undervalued in many
is that this option can be more expensive to deploy and maintain, since an organization must configure servers, install software and manage both internally. • Appliances that are deployed in-house and managed by in-house personnel
The advantage of this approach is that software and hardware are provided in a single, rack-mountable unit so that they work together seamlessly, and the cost of deployment is less than if software and hardware must be deployed separately. However,
appliances offer somewhat less flexibility than internally deployed software and
hardware and their cost for larger organizations can be higher than internally deployed software on a per user basis.
• A hosted/managed service
The primary advantages of this approach are that there are virtually no up-front costs and, hence, no capital expenditures; very little IT involvement in managing the system; and immediate scale and high availability. Because these services are priced on a per-seat basis, overall archiving costs can be more predictable. Further, the deployment of additional services or the extension of retention time can be much simpler with the use of a hosted or managed service. However, a hosted/managed service can be (but is not necessarily) more expensive per seat for larger organizations.
There is also a newer model for deploying messaging archiving known as Hybrid
Archiving. This model, which uses a combination of on-premise and hosted components, promises to combine the advantages of both models.
OPPORTUNITY COSTS
When making a decision about the delivery model for hosted vs. on-premise solutions, it is important to consider the opportunity costs, as well. Organizations may want to conduct their own cost/benefit analysis for the cost of using in-house staff to manage an archiving system vs. having the archive managed by a third-party. Some organizations may find it is cheaper to manage the system in-house, while others may find it less expensive overall to have a third party host their archiving capability.MESSAGING PLATFORM(S) SUPPORTED
A key consideration in choosing a messaging archiving system must include the platform(s) that the system will support. Some support only a specific messaging system, such as Microsoft Exchange, while others are system-agnostic. An organization that supports multiple messaging systems, or that may consider migrating to a new platform at some point, may want to opt for a system that is independent of any particular platform.
An organization that
supports multiple
messaging systems, or that
may consider migrating to a
new platform at some
HIGH AVAILABILITY
Because messaging archiving systems must capture all or nearly all email data, they must be highly available. For example, in a survey conducted by Osterman Research during 2007, it was determined that email downtime is considered to be a very serious problem by many organizations. However, the loss of email content during these downtime incidents was considered to be an even worse problem.
SCALABILITY
Messaging archiving systems must be able to store enormous amounts of data. For example, consider an organization of 3,000 email users who each generate 32 business records in email every workday and whose email must be retained for seven years. Further, consider that email use is growing 20% annually. Based on these relatively conservative assumptions, this organization will generate a total of 310 million messages during just seven years. The archiving system must be able to index and search across all of this information efficiently and quickly.
EASE-OF-USE
Ease-of-use is a critical consideration for any archiving system for a couple of reasons. In order to minimize user-training requirements, the interface should be as simple as possible for IT to use when data is requested from the archive. More important, however, is that often non-IT groups will need to have access to the archive, making the minimization of training an even more important requirement as the number of potential users of the archiving system increases.
EXTENSIBILITY FOR NON-MESSAGING ARCHIVING
Email is, for the majority of organizations, the single most important repository of business records. However, there are a number of other repositories that must be archived for all of the reasons that are discussed in this report: legal and regulatory compliance, reduction of storage costs, etc. These repositories can include document management systems, CRM systems, inventory control systems and the like. It is important for an organization that is considering archiving to take a long term view toward the types of information it will need to archive and to consider the ability for its systems to manage this content moving
forward.
Summary
An email archiving system can provide a number of very important benefits for organizations of all sizes, including support for its legal and regulatory compliance obligations; its growing storage requirements; its knowledge management obligations and other obligations. Although there are many issues to consider when deploying an
Archiving Vendors
ArcMail Technology provides simple, secure, and cost-effective email archiving solutions. that work with Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise and other mail servers with SMTP journaling functionality. ArcMail Defender network
appliances are designed to facilitate legal and regulatory compliance, improve the end-user experience, reduce the load on IT resources, and safely and securely retain the critical business information contained in emails. By combining the operating system and software with the database, on-board storage, and RAID disk management into the Defender line of email archive appliances, ArcMail has provided a unique archiving solution that is reliable, easy to install, use and maintain. without time-consuming end-user or IT intervention.
ArcMail Technology is located in Shreveport, Louisiana, with Development groups in Washington state and Arizona and a nationally deployed sales force in partnership with Marketlink.
Google Apps is a suite of applications that includes Gmail, Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk (instant messaging and voice over IP),
Google Docs & Spreadsheets (online document hosting and collaboration),
Google Page Creator (web page creation and publishing), Start Page (a single,
customizable access point for all
LiveOffice is a leading provider of hosted messaging services for businesses, including email and instant message archiving, compliance and e-discovery solutions, spam and virus protection, Hosted Exchange 2007 and Hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server. These services help companies ensure the integrity of messages, simplify the discovery process and protect themselves against the risk and expense of lost or misplaced messages. LiveOffice’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) model means
that clients do not have to purchase any hardware or software to deploy the solution, resulting in significant cost savings and fast implementation with virtually no ongoing maintenance. Administration and reporting is managed through an easy-to-use, password-protected, web-based interface. In addition, LiveOffice’s advanced message controls help organizations comply with statutory, regulatory, legal and industry-specific mandates.
Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Torrance, Calif., LiveOffice serves a premier roster of clients,
including Fortune 100 companies, and has a customer-retention rate of 99 percent. For more information, call (800) 251.3863 or visit www.liveoffice.com.
Mimecast protects your most important
communications and data. Mimecast’s email archiving is provided as part of a Unified Email Management service – a complete solution for email archiving, security, continuity, and policy management. Mimecast integrates with your existing IT to take care of all of your email requirements online, without the need for hardware or software and it takes just a few hours to set-up.
Because we offer a new way of doing things that is cheaper, faster, more secure and simply put – more intelligent, Mimecast has grown to be a very popular internet service taking care of millions of emails and documents for thousands of companies around the world.
Mimecast Services for Exchange & Outlook requires
less effort and removes the heavy technical and financial footprint that typical in-house archiving products demand. It supports your legal compliance requirements as email records are held in a tamper-proof, centralized and secure manner which can be
easily accessed using online e-discovery tools by authorized individuals should the need arise. Every email is captured with its complete data set required to support legislative cases including proof of delivery and receipts; copies of email pre-post disclaimers and marketing; policies applied to each email; and access and searches performed.
Delivery model - Software-as-a-Service. Delivers cost savings of up to 75% over
traditional in-house methods.
Supports all email messaging platforms, including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes,
Groupwise.
Highly available - Continuity service ensures users can continue working during outages. Rapid deployment - Connect in a day.
Scalability - Up to 10 years of data can be stored. Mimecast’s storage grid is a massively
scalable and resilient grid designed to service thousands of customers simultaneously and delivers sub-second search response times.
Easy to use - Accessed via the web or through Microsoft Outlook. Administrators have
complete control via a single online console.
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation information management solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa™ NearPoint™ for Microsoft® Exchange Server is the industry’s most comprehensive information management software solution for Microsoft Exchange, unifying email
archiving, recovery, and storage management. With options for eDiscovery and disaster recovery, NearPoint ensures litigation readiness and email continuity, while leveraging cost-effective disk technologies to optimize email storage growth. Mimosa is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recognized for its competencies in Networking Infrastructure Solutions, ISV/Software Solutions, and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions. Mimosa is a privately held company whose investors include August Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, Dot Edu Ventures, JAFCO Ventures, and Mayfield Fund.
Mimosa was founded in 2003 and is based in Santa Clara, California, with offices in Munich, Germany, and Pune, India. For more information, see www.MimosaSystems.com
Quest Software, Inc., Microsoft’s 2007 Global Independent Software Vendor Partner of the Year, delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and Windows infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 50,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT.
Quest’s Unified Communications product line is
comprised of migration, management and archiving and discovery tools that have been expanded to support numerous platforms, including BlackBerry, Sendmail and Postfix as well as instant messaging, voice-over-IP, and audio and video conferencing.
Quest offers Archive Manager, which captures, indexes and stores messaging and file data to help control data volumes, reduce the cost associated with storage management and quickly respond to discovery or compliance requests. Using Archive Manager before a migration will shorten the coexistence period and reduce the cost associated with the migration and the risks associated with losing end users’ information. Capturing all message data through journaling, Archive Manager retains that information based on the organization’s electronic document management policies and centralizes it into a single, searchable repository, thus shortening your e-discovery response time. The product supports multiple platforms, including Microsoft Exchange Sever, Novell GroupWise and selected SMTP servers.
Quest can be found in offices around the world and online at www.quest.com.
Smarsh® is a leading managed service provider of innovative, secure and reliable email archiving solutions for message compliance and records retention, legal e-discovery and litigation readiness, and mail server data management.
Smarsh built its reputation upon years of experience with clients in the financial services industry. Founded in 2001 by CEO Stephen Marsh initially as a financial technology solutions and consulting corporation, the primary focus of Smarsh swiftly became email archiving as more and more firms scrambled to meet electronic communications regulatory mandates from the SEC and FINRA. Smarsh quickly became recognized as the experts in the industry by helping its clients pass thousands of audits with its extremely reliable email archiving solutions.
Handling the sophisticated and demanding archiving needs of this market left Smarsh well-positioned as the need for electronic message archiving solutions began to emerge from
other industries. So much of today's business is conducted electronically, via email specifically, and governance of this mission-critical data – the ability to organize, index, efficiently retrieve and protect – is an industry-agnostic necessity.
Complementing the company’s scalable, robust and secure email-archiving system, Smarsh’s proprietary Web-based compliance tool provides versatile, customizable and efficient means for message classification, retrieval and surveillance. Smarsh offers a full-service suite of solutions to protect your company’s electronic communication and bolster its business-continuity efforts, such as instant-message management, Website hosting, email hosting, spam-filtering, virus protection and online data back-up.
Smarsh solutions are user-friendly and supported by an unmatched commitment to customer service, featuring a dedicated implementation team and round-the-clock support. Smarsh is consistently adding redundancy and optimizing performance to sustain client and systems growth. Independent of overall storage volumes or its number of clients, Smarsh’s infrastructure easily manages the millions of messages it processes each day. The Smarsh development team is tirelessly working to monitor and improve its pioneering technology so that the end-user will experience superior search and retrieval times. Smarsh also takes great pride in its reputation as a model for on-line security, using only the best servers, network hardware, software applications, facilities and methods available.
For more information, contact us at 1.866.SMARSH1 or visit www.smarsh.com.
St. Bernard is the world’s only Hybrid Security solutions provider. St. Bernard offers a full suite of Hybrid Security solutions that integrate on-premise appliances with on-demand services to protect corporate networks from online threats, archive messages, and enforce acceptable use policies.
St. Bernard’s suite of iPrism® solutions – iPrism Email Filter, iPrism Web Filter, iPrism IM Filter and iPrism Message Archive – deliver secure content management with the control of an appliance combined with the scalability of a hosted service. St. Bernard’s iPrism solutions prevent Internet threats like spam, viruses, spyware and phishing from entering corporate networks across all electronic communications: email, IM and Web. St. Bernard’s iPrism Message Archive provides a hybrid solution for archiving email and IM messages for legal, compliance and storage management needs. The on-premise appliance provides customer control over directory server and mail server integration, while the on-demand services provide secure,
redundant, scalable storage. Messages are archived at multiple, geographically diverse data centers, providing customers with disaster recovery options.
Headquartered in Tampa Bay (Clearwater), Florida, Sunbelt Software was founded in 1994 and is a leading provider of Windows security and management software with product solutions in the areas of antispam and antivirus, antispyware, and vulnerability assessment. Leading products include the CounterSpy product line, Ninja Email Security, Sunbelt Exchange Archiver, and endpoint firewall technologies.
For archiving needs, Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) delivers cost-effective enterprise-class email archiving for organizations of all sizes, providing administrators with intelligent features such as integrated Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM), Direct Archiving for instant archival of incoming mail, full email continuity and disaster recovery, and seamless integration with Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Outlook Web Access (OWA).
SEA combines efficiency and innovation to give organizations a powerful email lifecycle
management system that offers tamper-proof,
long-term storage of emails with easy retrieval capabilities and full-text searching. SEA enables companies to preserve all electronic messages on a broad range of storage media, offloading the strain on Exchange servers.
SEA provides a cost-effective solution for customers concerned with archiving email for legal, retention and compliance reasons, as well as significant benefits in terms of reducing the size of the Exchange store. With SEA, our customers are able to better cope with the growing volume of emails and gain control over their email management storage costs while ensuring compliance and increasing performance and efficiency.
Waterford Technologies’ MailMeter is a modular solution for email archiving, storage management, eDiscovery, compliance, reporting /monitoring, and file archiving. It focuses on ease of use, ease of installation, low resource consumption, and delivers the lowest cost for on-going management. It supports these email servers: Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Ipswitch IMail, and SeattleLab SLMail Pro. MailMeter’s architecture scales easily from 50 to 20,000 mailboxes.
Sunbelt Software
33 North Garden Avenue
Suite 1200
Clearwater, FL 33755
+1 888 688 8457
www.sunbeltsoftware.com
Waterford Technologies, Inc.
19700 Fairchild
Suite 300
Irvine, CA 92612
+1 949 428 9300
MailMeter Storage Manager reduces the storage of email servers by 70-80% by removing attachments on messages that meet your criteria (age, folder location, type of attachment, size) and replacing the attachment with a “stub” link to the attachment in the archive.
MailMeter Investigate is a powerful tool for reducing legal costs. It allows internal staff to quickly search through the archive and find messages that meet your eDiscovery requests. You can easily organize messages and export them out to PSTs.
MailMeter Insight uniquely delivers over 40 standard reports on activity through your email servers. You can automatically send reports to managers on employees who send the most email, which organizations they talk to, etc. HR personnel can get complete analysis of every email sent or received over any time period for any employee. Compliance officers can monitor attachment and messages sent to suspicious locations. IT staff can analyze mailbox sizes and user activity.
MailMeter Compliance Review brings an easy to use solution for two groups: 1) to meet the SEC and FINRA requirements for email archiving and random reviews with audit trails; and 2) for Acceptable Usage monitoring – searching for inappropriate or dangerous words.
© 2008 Osterman Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Osterman Research, Inc. does not provide legal advice. Nothing in this document constitutes legal advice, nor shall this document or any software product or other offering referenced herein serve as a substitute for the reader’s compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statue, regulation, rule, directive, administrative order, executive order, etc. (collectively, “Laws”)) referenced in this document. If necessary, the reader should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any Laws referenced herein. Osterman Research, Inc. makes no representation or warranty regarding the completeness or accuracy of the information contained in this document.
