Expert Guide:
Selecting the Right
Email Archiving Tool
for Your Business
While archiving users’ emails for legal purposes is essential, selecting and
standardizing an archiving product that meets your business requirements
is both time-consuming and costly. In this Pocket E-Guide, brought to you
by SearchDomino.com and RSD, you will gain insight into the steps
essential for selecting a comprehensive email archiving solution. Explore
the top ten questions that should be asked when evaluating archiving
tools and learn how to determine which archiving features are essential
for your business environment. Discover best practices critical for
ensuring your email archiving initiative meets all legal and regulatory
demands.
Sponsored By:
Pocket E-Guide
SearchExchange.com
SearchSQLServer.com
SearchWindowsServer.com
SearchDomino.com
Table of Contents:
Ten considerations for email archiving
Top 10 best practices for email archiving
Resources from RSD
Expert Guide:
Selecting the Right
Email Archiving Tool
for Your Business
Ten considerations for email archiving
More and more companies are archiving their users' emails for business and legal reasons. If you haven't standardized on an archiving product, it can be a time-consuming process to find one that fits your company's needs; there are many choices available and each tool has unique features.
When examining an email archiving product, it's important to know how well it's suited to the specific requirements of the email system it's intended to protect. I've reviewed many of these products and compared their functionality to the requirements of dozens of companies. The following 10 questions will help you narrow down the available email archiving products to those that best serve your needs.
Not all of the following 10 questions will be important to every storage environment, but each one should be considered when making a product selection. You should decide whether or not a particular function is important in your environment. Not all email archiving implementations require legal-hold capability, for example. There can also be a spectrum of answers to each question, and not every environment needs the most extreme, feature-rich solution.
There are many considerations beyond the technical issues outlined here. One of the primary deciding factors in any technology purchase is cost, which itself includes many variables. Vendor reputation, customer service and geo-graphic support coverage may all influence product selection. While these factors aren't taken into account in this article, any one of them may have an impact and must be carefully considered.
1. How complete is the archive?
Not all email archiving solutions capture every email, but that might not be desired. In some environments, only messages sent or received from the outside world need to be retained, so an email archive that uses a gateway approach would be acceptable. But many organizations require a more complete set of email messages, so the archive must interact with the mail server to ensure that all messages, both internal and external, are retained.
Even if an email archiving application captures inside and outside messages, some messages may still fall through the cracks. Archives that "sweep" through the mail system on a scheduled basis can miss
messages that are sent, received and deleted between sweeps. Since every message has both a sender and a recipient, both of them would have to delete the message (and potentially empty their trash folder) to hide a message in this way, which is often called a "double delete" scenario. Organizations that are focused on compliance must ensure that their email archive captures every message.
2. Does it record what people do?
One step beyond a complete set of messages is an archive that maintains a record of user actions. Some systems are capable of recording whether a user opened, forwarded, flagged or filed an email message, a feature that has proven popular in product demonstrations.
Ten considerations for email archiving
However, "just because a message is marked as 'read' doesn't mean that a user really read it," says Matthew Ushijima, director of IT network operations at Empire Today. "Outlook's preview pane can interfere in both positive and negative ways, making this [product feature] not the most reliable data source," he adds.
Capturing the actions users take regarding their email messages is a difficult technical problem. Traditional archiving products, which commonly use Exchange journaling, must sweep through the mail system using MAPI to periodically examine each message to capture this so-called user-action meta data. MAPI sweeps consume valuable CPU and IO resources, so additional mail servers must be added to handle the load. An alternative approach to archiving, called log shipping, doesn't require these intensive sweeps, but is much less common. Consider whether this kind of user-action information is critical to your archiving needs.
3. Can the archive ingest an existing mail store or PST files?
Many organizations would like their email archive to include messages that existed before the archiving application was installed. These messages typically come from the mail system itself, which might include a decade or more of old mail, as well as from offline or user-created archives, like the PST files created by Microsoft's Outlook mail client. Many archiving programs are able to pull in these old messages, but some can't (see "PST indigestion," below).
Bringing in old messages from a mail server generally requires an intensive migration process using the MAPI protocol. This can take a few days, so the process is often performed over a weekend; large environments and those with email servers in multiple locations may find that it takes much longer. Most email clients store personal archives on local disks, so these may be anywhere your users are, including laptops, desktops, network shares and portable drives. This makes importing archives tricky, as they must first be located and consolidated. Not every system can handle all formats, which can range from Outlook PST to Notes NSF, to Unix mbox and maildir files.
No matter where historic messages are imported from, the archive that contains them should be flagged as incomplete and potentially unreliable if ediscovery is a consideration. Both email servers and personal archives are almost certainly missing a great many messages. It's a trivial operation to change the content of most personal archives; modern email archive systems are far more tamper-proof.
4. Can the archive handle multiple email systems?
Not every email archiving application is capable of handling multiple email servers. If your environment features more than one email server, and especially if a variety of email systems are in use, this feature could prove critical. Generally speaking, archives that use a messaging gateway are far more flexible in heterogeneous environments than those that integrate more directly with the mail system.
This is especially common in organizations created as the result of corporate mergers, but some organiza-tions find themselves in possession of heterogeneous mail systems for historic reasons. Whatever the cause, many email archive solutions don't support all of the various email servers, including Microsoft
5. What about non-message content?
Some email archiving applications focus only on messages, while others can also archive calendar items, tasks and contacts. A few also support other applications, including file systems, instant messages and database applications. Not every environment needs this type of archiving, but be sure to set expectations with management and your legal department about what is and isn't saved. While some archiving systems support content outside the email system, "email is the most critical," maintains Kelly Ferguson, senior product marketing manager for email archiving at EMC Corp. "Including file systems and SharePoint is nice, but email must get under control because it has the biggest risk due to message proliferation. Customers are starting with email, but have the expectation that the system can expand to other content types as need arises."
THE NEXT FIVE EMAIL ARCHIVING CONSIDERATIONS
PST Indigestion
Eliminating "Underground Archives" like Microsoft Outlook PST files is a primary goal of many email archiving projects, but one that often proves difficult to attain. It's a simple matter to turn off PST archive support in Outlook, but this must be put off until existing archives are located and ingested. Remind users that the new archive will actually make their mail more available to them; with the company archive they may now be able to access their old messages from Outlook Web Access (OWA) and BlackBerry devices.
But beware when importing old archives that have been out of your control. At the very least, they're incomplete, as users almost certainly selectively saved email, deleting some, keeping others in their inbox and archiving a few. It's also possible for a malicious user to have changed the content of one of these personal offline archives, creating new messages, or deleting or modifying old ones. Therefore, you must consider how reliable this source is from a legal or compliance perspective.
If you're applying a deletion policy to email, consider suspending it, at least temporarily, when it comes to PST imports. If you import old archived mail and then immediately delete it, you'll lose credibility in the eyes of the very users you're trying to help, and possibly raise compliance and legal issues. Give your users enough time to
categorize and thus preserve their imported messages, and then educate them about the importance of retention and destruction.
Ten considerations for email archiving
Document volume is growing, in no small part thanks to email.
Compliance rules, regulations, and laws governing content are also
expanding.
Your information governance solution must give you centralized control.
While supporting distributed, disparate content – from email, to reports
and statements, to customer records.
So far, archiving solutions have failed to break the concrete bond
between policies and repositories.
To learn more, please visit us at www.rsd.com.
The time has come for a change.
Top 10 best practices for email archiving
Bill Tolson, ContributorWith today's compliance, legislation and legal discovery rules, it has become necessary for many IT departments to manage the entire company's email archiving in bulk so specific messages can be located in minutes, not weeks. In this tip, expert Bill Tolson provides the top 10 best practices for email archiving.
1. Understand what your main problems are before you purchase technology.
The biggest mistake IT managers make when researching email archiving is to not fully understanding the reasons for it. Often, companies are reacting to one problem of concern, such as an audit suggestion, which leads to rushing out to buy email archiving technology for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and not taking into account productivity or storage problems.
Most companies will have more than one problem that can be solved with email archiving. Whether it be regulatory compliance, litigation support or storage management, make sure you understand all of your needs before you take the next step.
2. Create or update email retention policy to reflect today's business needs.
Very few companies have an up-to-date data retention policy. An effective document retention policy will address what the document retention policy covers, the company data retention philosophy, responsibilities and procedures. It will also have retention timeframes for all types of records in a company including unstructured data like
Microsoft Office files, semi-structured records like email and structured records like mainframe databases. You will also want to create retention schedules that employees can easily follow and remember. Make these documents short and simple. Also document how long you will keep records (including emails).
3. Periodically perform a legal or regulatory refresh.
When you have a data retention policy, be sure to review it annually. Regulations and laws change regularly, and so must your data retention policy. New regulations are created regularly as well as judicial rules of evidence.
Government regulatory agencies and the courts expect companies to be fully aware of new regulations and laws.
4. Include all stakeholders: legal, compliance, HR, finance, investor relations,
engineering, production and administration.
A data retention policy affects every employee in the company and should reflect input from everyone. Create a cross-functional team that represents most business operations or departments. Interview a wide sampling of employees and departments to determine how and why they create documents; if they re-use or reference them later; and where they store the documents. This helps you create a retention policy that won't adversely affect the employees and their day-to-day work.
Top 10 best practices for email archiving
5. Focus on similarities in laws or regulations and create "high water mark"
retention lengths.
Multipage retention schedules are rarely effective or followed. Simplify them as much as possible. Most data reten-tion requirements are for minimum retenreten-tion periods. Create "high water marks" for similar types of documents. For example, retention regulations for employment records vary widely from one year to 10-plus years. It is easier for employees to follow one retention period that meets all retention requirements for all employee-related records than to try to remember many different retention periods. Creating high-water marks for retention periods will also make it much easier to adopt automated email archiving processes.
6. Socialize your policy companywide.
Be sure to adequately inform employees about the new or existing policy and make it easily accessible. Many employees don't know if their company has a data retention policy or where to find it if there is one. All employees should be "trained" on a new policy, including knowing why the policy was created (legal, regulatory or other); how to use any new technology associated with the new policy; and consequences for the company and employee if the policy is not followed. Offer annual training refreshers.
7. Don't attempt to teach employees to subjectively recognize "business"
records.
It is very difficult to create a uniform archive across a company if you are asking employees to individually decide which records are business records and what can be archived. For example, in a company of 1,000 employees, you will have 1,000 different retention policies if you rely on employees to interpret the policy and make archiving decisions. The less complicated the policy, the more uniform the archives will be.
8. Don't forget the email use policy.
Even when you have a data retention policy, you should still publish an email use policy that informs the employees of their responsibilities, including things they shouldn't do, privacy expectations and consequences for system misuse.
9. Move email retention from a manual process to an automated process.
Take email archiving out of the hands of employees. Automated email archiving will ensure uniform archiving, increase employee and IT productivity and most importantly, put in place a system that can ensure no message protection if a litigation hold procedure is instituted.
10. Discourage employees from creating personal archives (PSTs).
Most employees, in companies without email archiving automation, create their own "personal archives" or PSTs for many reasons. They create them for future protection, for reference or re-use. This adversely affects employee
Resources from RSD
“The Information Governance Imperative”
“Email Archiving, an Information Governance Imperative”
Information Governance Initiatives (records management, paperless administration) Deliver 532%
ROI
About RSD
Founded in 1973 in Geneva, with affiliates in New York and London, RSD helps companies meet the growing challenge of information governance by providing market-leading products for business information delivery, content and records management, and document archiving and retrieval.
RSD solutions are used by more than 1,200 organizations worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 500. Today RSD supports over 2 million users, and offers its innovative products and services in more than 26 countries around the globe – both directly and through strategic business partners.
Resources from RSD
Page 9 of 9 Sponsored by:
