Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Canada’s Derailed Emails

Even the Canadian government is required to produce electronically stored information (ESI), despite a ruling that cabinet confidentiality is absolute. BC Rail, formerly a crown corporation, sold to Canadian National Railway in 2004 for $1 billion and is now the subject of a trial surrounding a scandal known to Canadians as "Railgate". Now, emails relevant to the case appear to be getting "star witness" status. The only question is whether or not the messages still exist.

"Potentially the destruction of evidence, whether by recklessness, negligence ... or a willful failure to preserve, could be a very significant factor in the outcome of this case and it potentially could lead to a motion [of dismissal] for abuse of process," said Michael Bolton, one of the lawyers for the defense.

According to the Vancouver Sun, trial judge Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Bennett was told the emails, which were stored on backup tapes, had been sent to a company called EDS Advanced Solutions. The business and technology solution provider was told in May to no longer retain the data. Since then, Justice Bennett has ruled that the emails are indeed relevant to the case, and that they will need to be produced.

At this point, it's clear that the case hinges entirely on the content of these emails. If they can't be produced, the 0-60 time before a motion to dismiss arrives will be less than four seconds. It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out.

 

Backing Up vs. Archiving: What’s the Diff?

We get this question a lot from IT folks who have faithfully backing up their email for years.  First off, we are not suggesting you stop backing-up.  Far from it. 

Backing up your company data is important from a disaster recovery perspective.  A nice short-term insurance policy. Meaning that should your primary messaging environment (e.g., Exchange) collapse or fall victim to some type of natural or manmade disaster, you will have a copy of it stored safely offsite. 

That's obviously a good thang.

The trouble is some IT folks mistakenly believe that their back-up can also meet their email compliance or legal discovery needs.  But, think about it.  Let's say your company gets sued and the opposing council asks for an email thread involving Amy, your wayward manager prone to fits of rage, and her ex-employee, John, whom she summarily fired three years ago.

If you relied on back-up tapes, you would have to do the following:

1. Search for the old tapes (assuming you hadn't overwritten them)
2. Hope that you could restore the tape (assuming it wasn't corrupted after three years sitting in storage)
3. Try to find the relevant emails related to the case

Since people backup email servers every day, week and month, you don't end up having to restore one tape but often many.  For example, if you backup every day and want all email for a year, it could be 365 tapes.  And once you have all those tapes, you have to de-duplicate because you'll have tons of redundant data.  So, the process of restoring could literally take you weeks if not months

Another pitfall of backup is that you don't end up capturing ALL emails (e.g., data that was created and deleted in same day) because backups often happen just once a day and tapes often miss data sitting in people's laptops (e.g., PST files).

And there's a better than average chance that after all of this, you still won't be able to find the needle in the haystack.  This could cost you big time if the jury thinks you're trying to squash damaging evidence.

Now, let's compare that with an email archiving solution.  What's the difference?

First off, when you archive every email they get indexed and stored in the archive in real-time.  Because they have been indexed, it's easy to find an email based on the sender, the date range, subject line or even keywords in the email body or attachment with just a few clicks.  And perhaps, in the process, you may find that Amy actually had legal grounds to terminate John.

But, there are a few other benefits of archiving that you get as a bonus.

One. By having an email archive, you can reduce the size of your email storage since you can now safely "prune" these stores knowing that they have been securely archived.  Plus, you can now safely reduce the mailbox sizes allocated to your end users.

Two. By pruning your email stores, you can significantly shorten your backup windows (the time it takes to back up all of your email). 

And three. With many archiving solutions, you can even give your end users direct access to their own historical email.  Translation - they can restore their own email in seconds without having to involve YOU!  And in so doing, you can eliminate PSTs (personal email folders typically stored on their desktops) which can be missed during legal discovery and are prone to accidental loss.

Consequently, email archiving allows Exchange administrators to get a handle on some of their most common pains, including exploding email volumes and the daily challenges of backups.  We encourage you to learn more about these differences in our Archiving vs. Backing Up white paper.