NEWS

12/21/2005 - Email Data Management

Why is email data management important in a paperless environment?

Email is growing - not just the number of mailboxes, accounts, and the volume of messages, but also the size of messages and their attachments. Above all, the strategic business importance of email is growing. Email data management needs to be strongly considered. Enterprises are beginning to come to grips with the need for email data management, and you may have considered it. But whether you're an end user or an IT manager, a CIO or a CEO, you need email data management more than you think - because email is more complex and more businesses and government sectors are using email for data management and legal litigation purposes. Email management is the backbone of information distribution. A well managed email server is important for tracking, legal purposes, validated communications

Email: More than messaging

It's natural to think of email as a communications tool like the telephone or like voicemail. But the content of email encompasses much more than telephone calls or voicemail messages. From the standpoint of media, email can include text, formatted documents, graphics, voice and video, as well as executable files. From the standpoint of business content, emails potential is unlimited. And that fact is of critical business

importance.

Consider what types of information are conveyed by email in your enterprise. Sales proposals and requests

for proposal? Marketing plans? Drafts of strategic planning documents? Competitor profiles? Quarterly revenue forecasts? Contracts? Personnel files? IDC estimates that 60 percent of business-critical information is stored in messaging systems - but 81 percent of business users cannot access their own archived messages and attachments. [IDC, 2000] Important documents may be lost during a routine purge of old email messages or stored by email recipients in a haphazard fashion. If you don't have a system of email data management, then you don't control the availability of this critical information.

The tremendous and ever-increasing volume of email is the part of the problem that's easiest to see. But the

hidden problems of content access and record management make email data management more than

an end user problem, and more than an IT problem. Email is more than messaging. The opportunities and

risks that are literally attached to email make email data management a critical business process.

E-marketplaces are evolving

Forrester Research reports that the focus of e-marketplaces is evolving from transactions and commerce to include collaboration via email - a change that will increase email volume and make email messages more mission critical.

Forrester predicts that over 50 percent of online trade will flow through e-marketplaces by 2004, reinforcing the need for collaborative software and better email management.

The scope of the problem

According to Creative Networks, Inc. (CNI), the average email server is saturated in just 18 days. [CNI 2000]. IT administrators spend eight to twelve hours a week on email backup and archiving, and an additional five to six hours a week recovering deleted or lost messages and attachments for users. [CNI 2001]. Conservatively, that's over a quarter of the IT administrator's work week spent dealing with email data management! Factor in the time end-users spend managing their mailboxes - an estimated two hours per week in 2002 - and the cost in labor, productivity and systems becomes clear. This is the storage challenge of email data management. Typical users find themselves swamped with an average of 70 email messages per day. They can barely find time to respond, much less devise a method for managing their personal email archives. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult to locate information when it's needed and users spend countless hours searching for or reproducing data that's inaccessible or lost. Even with IT assistance, 26 percent of companies still cannot retrieve email from backup. [CNI 2001] While current email  management practices rely on backup tapes and end users' personal desktop archives, information contained in old email messages may be required for any number of business purposes. For example, the sales department may need to access a draft of a contract; customer service may need to review

communications that promise certain rewards to customers; human resources may have a question about

an employment offer. And because each individual user decides which email messages to retain or delete, much of this information is hidden from the rest of the organization. In a company of 8,000 people, that means the company has 8,000 different data retention policies. When an employee becomes unavailable, the wealth of mission critical information in his email becomes essentially unavailable.

This is the content management challenge of email data management. Estimating the cost of inadequate email content management in terms of productivity, well informed decision-making, etc., is not as straightforward as the costs of storage.

But with over 60 percent of critical business data stored in messaging systems, email data management, or the lack of it, affects over half the data used to run a business. The third challenge of email data management is record management. Organizations in the securities and exchange community need to maintain compliance with various rules for record maintenance. State and federal organizations

may be required to respond to Freedom of Information Act discovery requests. And any business may find itself in legal or regulatory circumstances, which require information stored in email or as attachments.

Currently, responding to such requests places a tremendous burden on IT resources. Backup tapes must

be restored to a replica of the production email server. A search may span several email servers and, in some cases, the personal archives of hundreds of desktop computers. The estimated costs for fulfilling a single discovery request runs from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, the cost of recovering 246,000 emails from approximately 4,900 backup tapes was estimated to cost the White House an estimated $10 million. [ Washington Times, May 4, 2000] The costs associated with discovery are so high that many companies choose to settle cases, even when they are not at fault. Is the lack of adequate email data management putting you at legal risk? 34.5 percent of organizations say they would not or could not recover emails if required for legal or regulatory discovery within the next 12 months. [CNI, 2001]. 83 percent of lawyers say their corporate clients are not prepared to retrieve and turn over electronic files. [Arthur Anderson, 2000] According to one analyst, 49 percent of organizations have established policies for email retention, but 41 percent of users ignore the policy. [CNI, 2001] Again the facts show that email is far bigger than just messaging; and the challenges of email data management are threefold: storage, content management, and records management with surveillance capabilities.

How email is growing

More email messages...larger-sized messages...but the really startling growth is in the additional amount of storage email requires on an annual basis:

Current practices in email data management

In an average office, each user is currently responsible for managing and archiving the estimated 3000 MB [multiple sources] of email received on his desktop annually. Even when desktop archive utilities and training are provided, the results vary according to individual user needs and work habits - especially given the lack of formal policies on message categorization or retention. With responsibility for email system performance and

availability, the IT department is concerned with preventing over-full message stores - a serious threat to email server performance. Because one email server houses the mailboxes of multiple users, the server can fill up easily, resulting in system shutdown and the unavailability of email service to all the users. Current IT practices tackle this problem by sending "delete your messages" notices to all users, or blind purging of the message stores. IT organizations often implement guidelines that treat old email messages as potential liabilities and recommend actively removing them from server message stores. Current IT practices also include encouraging users to create

personal desktop archives, and making routine backup tapes of all email servers. Because not all employees will

archive email properly on their desktops, backup tapes are the only centrally controlled and available archive of message stores. When it is necessary to recover messages - for enterprise users or for discovery requests - IT administrators can do so only by accessing the data on backup tapes, an expensive and time-consuming task.

To prevent over-full message stores, IT administrators often restrict the size of messages or attachments. However, limits on message or attachment size may inhibit the transmission of business-critical information, and result in lost productivity as the user spends time finding a work-around. In short, current email data management pits the need to retain information for future access against the need for email server availability. A better method of email data management would ensure that the right information is available when users need it, now and in the future.

Criteria for effective email data management solutions

Government and industry organizations have worked for several years to develop record-management guidelines for electronic documents, communications, and emails. While these various guidelines apply to a diverse range of organizations, any effective solution for managing email must include these capabilities:

• Archiving of email documents and attachments along with associated address and routing information in their original electronic form.
• Creation of an email policy that addresses message retention and filing requirements.
• Automatic, content-based classification of email to folders/categories within the system.
• Creation and execution of disposition instructions for each email folder/category.
• A feature that prevents administrators from tampering with audit records.
• Powerful search and retrieval tools for end users and administrators, based on a full-text index and user-defined metadata.

Use of random-access, low-cost and non-volatile media for long-term storage. Ideally, a message-store management solution should address both the basic requirements stemming from relevant, published guidelines and add value by bringing the power of data management to email systems - in essence, channeling the daily stream of email message and attachments into a tool that provides competitive advantage. Any such solution should address the requirements of users, IT administrators, management, and record-keeping professionals by providing the following benefits:

• Reduced IT costs through more efficient email server management. A product featuring automated capture, integrated support for low-cost mass storage, and content-based classification rules can transform an organization's temporary cache of messages on the server into a tool for enterprise document management. Mail servers are freed of message overload, improving performance and availability. Additionally, without the requirement to restrict message size, larger and more complex documents can be transmitted. As a result, email can serve as the basis for strategic planning and business development efforts without impacting IT.
• Quicker, lower-cost discovery actions. A product with full-text indexing and cataloguing features enables email discover actions to be completed in hours rather than weeks, greatly reducing expenses. Also desirable: a freeze' feature that may be used at the onset of any investigation to protect message categories from automatic destruction.
• Increased productivity through faster, easier access to stored messages. Full-text indexing combined with a powerful search engine would allow end users to access their own messages, while authorized managers or administrators could search across multiple mailboxes to meet audit and regulatory requirements, discovery requests, and other business needs.
• Record management. An effective solution ensures adherence to formal email policies with enterprise level data management tools that categorize and manage email through a useful life cycle. By using a tool that integrates record management functionality into email systems, organizations can easily comply with SEC and government requirements.
• Virus recovery and data protection. An effective solution ensures that email records are tamper-proof throughout their life cycle and guards against abuse by monitoring compliance with corporate policy. Such a solution should also facilitate cleanup of message stores following a virus attack, enabling recovery within hours rather than days and guarding against information loss.

An Exchange example

In the Microsoft Exchange environment, the email storage problem originates in the mail server, where all Exchange email is stored. As the Exchange database structure grows, its performance diminishes, and backups become difficult. Administrators then effectively move the challenge to end users, by creating a mailbox limit and requiring end users to create personal archives of their emails ("PSTs" - personal stores on desktop systems, and "OSTs" - offline stores downloaded to notebook PCs). Companies using there own email server eliminate the

email storage challenge, saving physical storage, reducing storage management costs and protecting email data.

Conclusion

Email is more than messaging. The growth of email entails not only more mailboxes and more messages, but longer messages with more diverse content, both in the message body and as attachments. The function of email has evolved beyond simple messaging - email is now a full-fledged, multi-purpose business tool. Email has become the de facto data center for an estimated 60 percent of business-critical information; but traditional email administration lacks the policies and procedures traditionally used to keep important business data safe and accessible. Email data management is vital to controlling access to mission-critical information. The three challenges of email data management are:

1. Finding cost-effective storage capacity for ever-increasing message stores, while keeping email information accessible.
2. Managing, tracking, storing email content.
3. Achieving a record-management system that complies with company, regulatory and legal standards.

An efficient enterprise email data management solution will meet end-user, IT, and management requirements, reduce costs, minimize risks, and boost productivity. The most effective email data management solutions will channel the daily stream of email message and attachments into

a tool that provides competitive advantage in a paperless environment. Our strategic sessions offers an excellent platform for email data management solutions.

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