Product category:
Training Aids and eCommunication
News Release from: Storage Expo | Subject: Storage Expo 2006
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 18 July 2006
Top four business reasons for email
archiving
Email generated by the corporate world continues to grow dramatically and storage-related costs of email are an escalating concern for IT executives.
Email generated by the corporate world continues to grow dramatically and storage-related costs of email are an escalating concern for IT executives In fact, it has been predicted that this year 84 billion emails will be sent daily worldwide, requiring nearly 4 billion MB of server storage
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 11 Jul 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Storage managers are waking up to the realisation that they need to dedicate a large amount of storage to email.
Within the corporate consciousness, storage of email has been the main driver for email archiving over the past few years.
It alone remains a prime reason for electronic information retention.
But the business case for email archiving does not stop there.
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Do you comply with electronic data laws?
How do companies ensure they are archiving and protecting business data to comply with electronic data laws?
As the lifeblood of the organisation, information flows through all aspects of the entity, and poor retention of it affects the business' overall health.
From cost savings to litigation readiness, there are many compelling business reasons to implement an email archiving system.
Backing up email data takes a serious bite out of most corporations' IT budgets.
In an attempt to constrain these spiralling costs, many companies put limits on the size of user's mailboxes, driving the proliferation of local archives on hard drives around the network.
These are notoriously problematic, resulting in lost information, reduced user productivity and an excessive burden on the IT help desk.
All of these are quantifiable costs of the enormous growth of corporate email.
Email archival offers companies a solution to these challenges with dramatic and immediate cost savings.
A state-of-the-art email archival solution will automatically apply corporate policies to offload messages from the email servers based on any combination of parameters such as age, size, status, sender and location.
These messages are moved into a scalable, searchable archive that is highly optimised for the storage of email.
The archive process is essentially transparent to the users, who can still access and work with their email through shortcuts or "stubs" inserted into their mailboxes in place of the archived messages.
Optimisation is the key to cost savings.
By compressing message and attachments and deploying "Single Instance Storage", which ensures that only one copy of each message is saved (along with pointers for each mailbox in which it was found), major savings are found.
One customer in northeast England, Northumberland County Council, who uses the Zantaz Enterprise Archiving Solution, tells the story of one personal archive file that was 232 megabytes prior to archiving - through compression in the archiving process it was reduced to 14 megabytes.
Some email archive solutions take it one step further with a feature called "attachment splitting," saving only a single instance of each attachment regardless of the number of different messages that may have contained it.
These optimisations substantially improve the efficiency of email storage compared to email servers, and their benefit is even greater when applied to personal archives.
In fact, EDF Energy, which uses Zantaz EAS to archive, has recovered three terabytes in network storage space and immediately saved GBP100,000 in disk space expansion.
In the past year, many organisations have seen email archiving as a good solution to address compliance with growing regulations in the UK.
This is especially true in the public sector where the Freedom of Information Act came into effect last January.
Requiring public entities to ensure retention of public data and then search and retrieve requested information quickly, the Act forced many local councils, police constabularies and national agencies to scrutinise their information retention policies.
As Keith Taylor of Northumberland County Council explains, "We knew that regulations would require us to have a strong grip on our digital information - the data we needed to keep and the data we needed to eliminate," explains Taylor.
"Our desire to ensure compliance was a key driver in our decision to purchase a digital archiving solution".
Beyond the public sector, other regulations have begun to impact public and private business.
Market Harborough Building Society was concerned about compliance with the myriad of regulations affecting banks, including the Data Protection Act and the upcoming Basel II.
If a company is found not to be compliant with these regulations, fines and penalties can occur.
"We knew an email archiving system would help us operationally by reducing retrieval times and the size of the Exchange database," explains Neil Williams, assistant general manager of IT at MHBS.
"But it was our compliance officer who was really driving the process; he wanted to ensure we were compliant with the wide array of regulations and policies being developed".
This year will bring more compliance worries to businesses in the UK.
July is the deadline set by the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act for foreign companies listed in the US.
And financial institutions will need to start to prepare for another major regulation, the EU's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), that will take effect in 2007.
While all of the regulations are concerned with different issues and govern various industries, almost all address how electronic information is handled and stored.
A solid information retention policy and system can alleviate compliance woes.
While businesses need to be compliant with regulations, they also need to be prepared for legal actions, including litigation, against them.
Preparing the vast information stores within a company for possible litigation can be daunting.
But doing so can pre-empt the spiralling costs of electronic disclosure when a dispute arises.
Why? Recent changes in the Civil Procedures Rules governing the courts require a deep exploration into a company's electronic information during a disclosure request.
With more than 14 megabytes of email sent and received by every user every day that can be a high order.
As such, the associated costs of responding to a timely disclosure request when working with bloated email stores and antiquated or haphazard records retention policies - such as a backup tape recovery process - can be crippling.
Litigation readiness is a new, but growing practice in the field of electronic disclosure that reduces litigation risk.
In a recent report, IDC writes: "Litigation readiness is ultimately about keeping your house in order before an imminent risk strikes".
"In other words, a systematic approach to electronic discovery has a high payoff by eliminating the fire drills and easing the pain that comes along with legal discovery".
Technologies, such as email archiving, that improve information retention in a way that makes electronic disclosure more efficient and cost effective are critical to being ready for litigation.
For example, reducing time of review - the biggest cost in the disclosure process - is a bottom-line benefit of a robust information retention technology.
Email archiving can do some of the work for the lawyer upfront - before it's even needed - such as de-duping and applying date ranges, providing significant savings in legal fees.
Email now represents more than 60 percent of all person-to-person communications in European enterprises, according to a report last year by Quocirca.
And yet, a recent survey of IT Directors from 100 UK-based companies by Vanson Bourne for Adaptec found that a full 47 percent of IT Directors would not be able to retrieve an email more than three years old.
Even in the US, 45 percent of organisations do not have policies or systems in place to prevent users from deleting important email.
This lack of organisation around information retention does not just increase organisational costs; it also negatively impacts the flow of knowledge around the company.
Furthermore, when someone walks out the door and an email mailbox is unused, a lot of knowledge walks out as well.
There are caches of knowledge throughout a company that should be preserved as corporate knowledge, regardless of compliance requirements or litigation needs.
Knowledge is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage within a company.
Protecting it by retaining email in scalable, searchable archive is critical for any business.
Many IT executives are realising that email archiving pays for itself simply through optimisation of email storage.
But other business issues, such as compliance, litigation and knowledge management, are also eased by improved retention and retrieval of email.
The business case for email archiving has never been stronger.
Zantaz is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2006 the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage, now in its 6th year, the show features a comprehensive Free education programme, and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 18 - 19 October 2006.
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