Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Abracadabra – Emails Begone!

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We've come to the point in which it's no longer a surprise when emails just magically vanish from their respective environment. As reported by The News & Observer here, this has happened yet again as James Oblinger, the former chancellor of N.C. State University, had lost six months of high-priority correspondence. These emails have recently become relevant to litigation pertaining to how Oblinger allegedly helped to create a job for First Lady Mary Easley that involved an 88 percent pay increase in one year.

John Woodward, the university's interim chancellor, takes the stance that the university's retention policy calls for the emails to be deleted and that the data wasn't manually removed. N.C. State is now bringing in forensic technicians to determine whether or not any of the data can be recovered.

I'd say that this is all the more reason to have an archiving solution in place while maintaining appropriate retention policies. Granted, if you're in a regulated industry you're generally only required to keep your email for a certain length of time. But would it really hurt to cover all of your bases by keeping it longer? If you've got nothing to hide, you're only protecting yourself and potentially eliminating concerns stressed by potential accusers.

After all, wasn't it just a week ago that I blogged about a similar topic? Raise your hand if you're beginning to tire of emails that vanish faster than David Copperfield. At least in this case, Oblinger didn't opt for the Tyrell S. Drew hand drill method.

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

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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.