Monday, November 29, 2004
Why archive e-mail?
Why archive e-mail?
By Isabelle Chan, CNETAsia
26/11/2004
E-mail is one of the most important platforms for business communications today.
E-mail messages no longer contain just casual comments but important business information, such as sales contracts, project proposals and supplier instructions, as well.
With e-mail messages serving as business records, too, companies should take the necessary steps to properly archive the messages so as to ensure they can be easily retrieved when required.
Proper e-mail archiving is important for several reasons.
Firstly, it is to ensure corporate compliance with laws and regulations mandating records retention.
"In the absence of government regulations, corporate record-keeping is a must as the important corporate knowledge base is stored within these systems."
"In the absence of government regulations, corporate record-keeping is a must as the important corporate knowledge base is stored within these systems," said Simon Piff, Microsoft's regional solutions marketing manager, Asia-Pacific and Greater China.
Storing these electronic records in their original message formats can be a critical and important requirement as well, especially for litigation purposes. Companies should be able to easily search and retrieve past records.
Do they know?
Industry observers say the awareness level for good e-mail management is low among small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) in Asia.
"We don't have actual data, but I would estimate it to be less than 5 percent in our region," said Boey Yoke Khew, regional marketing manager for StorageTek.
Piff believes that most SMBs are generally aware of this need, but "like their bigger counterparts, small companies often underestimate how much important information that is worth backing up, is stored in, say, Microsoft Outlook".
Although there is no available market research indicating the amount Asian SMBs spend on e-mail-related storage, Piff said research shows that developing a strategy to manage e-mail records better could save them money.
IDC's research reveals that 40 percent to 45 percent of an enterprise's storage is allocated to storing e-mail.
"Some industry experts say that archival of e-mail records represent the third largest costs associated with managing e-mail records," said Piff.
On average, most organizations find that 1 TB of archived e-mail messages result in a US$100,000 expense annually, he added.
The analysts at the Radicati Group estimate that the average corporate e-mail user sends and receives a total of 84 messages per day. The average message size of a message without an attachment is about 22KB.
By 2008, the research firm estimates that an average corporate e-mail user will process up to 15.8 MB of data per day. For a company with 1,000 users, that is an average of 10 GB per day, 50 GB per week, or 200 GB per month.
"With the deluge of e-mail messages and the increase in corporate mailboxes, IT administrators have to deal with rising costs of e-mail management," said Piff.
Piff estimates that IT administrators can spend as much as 25 percent of their time managing e-mail data. They also spend eight to 12 hours a week performing e-mail backup and archiving, and about five hours a week recovering archived messages and attachments for users.
Should you archive everything?
"Many organizations don't think about data loss until it happens. Whether customer records, accounting data, billing information, or documents and e-mail, data loss can be devastating," said Yeong Chee Wai, the technical consultant manager for Veritas Software Singapore.
One of the biggest challenges is knowing what to archive and for how long.
However, one of the biggest challenges is knowing what to archive and for how long. Should you back up junk e-mail and non-business-related interoffice e-mail? What are the security implications of having a large, detailed e-mail archive for an entire organization? How can you find the data quickly when you need it?
Archiving is a key factor in good e-mail management, and it is important to implement the right business policy that is supported by a good archiving system.
Yeong says the ideal solution must back up more data with less hardware, in less time, and with fewer resources.
According to the storage expert, archiving using predefined business rules and policies enable IT to archive and store data on the most appropriate media while retaining on-demand access. "The policy-based nature of the combined solutions is ideal for addressing a range of database growth and storage issues," explained Yeong.
Different strokes for different folks
Every company has a different approach to managing e-mail.
According to StorageTek's Boey, most companies manage e-mail at the server (post-office) level by limiting the size of storage available to each user. "And a lot of users overcome that problem by downloading their e-mails into their personal computers or notebooks," he said.
SMBs also commonly set a maximum size limit for an e-mail, which provides some storage management but is "generally not an effective method", he added.
E-mail archiving is a standard feature in many commercial e-mail server systems, such as Microsoft Exchange. However, are they optimal for long-term management?
"By itself, Exchange has limited archiving and records management functionality, but Microsoft works with supporting partners to provide services and applications that back up, restore, archive and manage Exchange Server data."
"By itself, Exchange has limited ARM (archiving and records management) functionality, but Microsoft works with supporting partners, such as CA, EMC, HP, Legato Software and Veritas, to provide services and applications that back up, restore, archive and manage Exchange Server data," said Piff.
According to Piff, ARM products and services share three core features: centralized administration, selective retention and real-time search and retrieval.
In centralized administration, organizations can define policy-based retention rules and schedules to capture and store e-mail records.
Selective retention allows organizations to specific the criteria to filter out unnecessary or redundant e-mail. For example, filters can identify and ignore spam and duplicate messages so only important business e-mail is archived, Piff explained.
The third feature enables users to run full-text searches on any stored data, as well as retrieve the data in real-time with no temporal delay.
Another challenge is in the cost-effective management of e-mail server performance and reliability as the e-mail database grows, and an SMB has to decide what is the acceptable backup and restore time. Several storage management vendors offer technologies placing e-mail messages in a separate repository and on less-expensive storage media.
According to Yeong, most SMBs use standalone backup-to-tape systems to protect the data in the e-mail server. Some users centralize the e-mail data in a few e-mail servers. Others store most of their e-mail data on the client desktop or laptop machines, using the e-mail servers as transfer agents only.
Ajit Nair, EMC's technology solutions director for South Asia, said more education is needed for SMBs to understand the limitations of tape for backup and recovery.
He pointed out that the traditional backup method using tape uses significant server cycles and impacts the production server. "While the backup is being performed, the production server performance is degraded and the users will see a difference in how responsive their e-mail system is," he explained.
"With tape, recovering backed up data takes significantly longer," he added.
Nair recommends online backup and restore capabilities to reduce the time needed. "By creating replicas of the production data on the storage array, organizations can recover from server failures or database corruptions in a matter of minutes rather than hours," he noted. Storage array refers to a linked group of one or more independent hard disk drives generally used to replace larger, single disk drive systems.
EMC has a product targeted at SMBs that use Microsoft Exchange. Priced from US$43,000, the EMC Express solution for e-mail is designed and tested for up to 5,000 seats storing years of e-mail volume consolidated on a single storage array, Nair claims.
The product is said to reduce Microsoft Exchange total cost of ownership by up to 30 percent and reduce Exchange storage requirements by up to 70 percent.
Beyond e-mail
Wally Tung, an executive with IBM Asia-Pacific's Storage Networking, Systems and Technology Group, pointed out that data management and retention should not be limited to just one type of data e-mail but to other kinds of data that are important to the business. These include instant messages, voice mails, digitized photos and video, presentation slides, transaction logs, which IBM refers to as "retention managed data".
"The important requirement from our customers is that they need a way to retain and protect any kind of data for a variety of reasons. Hence, the more appropriate management term, retention managed data is used to represent the management characteristic rather than some data characteristic," explained Tung.
He also urged SMBs to start defining a strategy, as information management becomes a critical part of every businesses process.
"In compliance and data retention, the customer’s problems (pain) cannot simply be solved by a storage solution," noted Tung. "Compliance is not about buying a box or deploying software or engaging professional services. Compliance is a mandatory strategy that combines technology and services and includes both a data retention strategy as well as an internal philosophy."
By Isabelle Chan, CNETAsia
26/11/2004
E-mail is one of the most important platforms for business communications today.
E-mail messages no longer contain just casual comments but important business information, such as sales contracts, project proposals and supplier instructions, as well.
With e-mail messages serving as business records, too, companies should take the necessary steps to properly archive the messages so as to ensure they can be easily retrieved when required.
Proper e-mail archiving is important for several reasons.
Firstly, it is to ensure corporate compliance with laws and regulations mandating records retention.
"In the absence of government regulations, corporate record-keeping is a must as the important corporate knowledge base is stored within these systems."
"In the absence of government regulations, corporate record-keeping is a must as the important corporate knowledge base is stored within these systems," said Simon Piff, Microsoft's regional solutions marketing manager, Asia-Pacific and Greater China.
Storing these electronic records in their original message formats can be a critical and important requirement as well, especially for litigation purposes. Companies should be able to easily search and retrieve past records.
Do they know?
Industry observers say the awareness level for good e-mail management is low among small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) in Asia.
"We don't have actual data, but I would estimate it to be less than 5 percent in our region," said Boey Yoke Khew, regional marketing manager for StorageTek.
Piff believes that most SMBs are generally aware of this need, but "like their bigger counterparts, small companies often underestimate how much important information that is worth backing up, is stored in, say, Microsoft Outlook".
Although there is no available market research indicating the amount Asian SMBs spend on e-mail-related storage, Piff said research shows that developing a strategy to manage e-mail records better could save them money.
IDC's research reveals that 40 percent to 45 percent of an enterprise's storage is allocated to storing e-mail.
"Some industry experts say that archival of e-mail records represent the third largest costs associated with managing e-mail records," said Piff.
On average, most organizations find that 1 TB of archived e-mail messages result in a US$100,000 expense annually, he added.
The analysts at the Radicati Group estimate that the average corporate e-mail user sends and receives a total of 84 messages per day. The average message size of a message without an attachment is about 22KB.
By 2008, the research firm estimates that an average corporate e-mail user will process up to 15.8 MB of data per day. For a company with 1,000 users, that is an average of 10 GB per day, 50 GB per week, or 200 GB per month.
"With the deluge of e-mail messages and the increase in corporate mailboxes, IT administrators have to deal with rising costs of e-mail management," said Piff.
Piff estimates that IT administrators can spend as much as 25 percent of their time managing e-mail data. They also spend eight to 12 hours a week performing e-mail backup and archiving, and about five hours a week recovering archived messages and attachments for users.
Should you archive everything?
"Many organizations don't think about data loss until it happens. Whether customer records, accounting data, billing information, or documents and e-mail, data loss can be devastating," said Yeong Chee Wai, the technical consultant manager for Veritas Software Singapore.
One of the biggest challenges is knowing what to archive and for how long.
However, one of the biggest challenges is knowing what to archive and for how long. Should you back up junk e-mail and non-business-related interoffice e-mail? What are the security implications of having a large, detailed e-mail archive for an entire organization? How can you find the data quickly when you need it?
Archiving is a key factor in good e-mail management, and it is important to implement the right business policy that is supported by a good archiving system.
Yeong says the ideal solution must back up more data with less hardware, in less time, and with fewer resources.
According to the storage expert, archiving using predefined business rules and policies enable IT to archive and store data on the most appropriate media while retaining on-demand access. "The policy-based nature of the combined solutions is ideal for addressing a range of database growth and storage issues," explained Yeong.
Different strokes for different folks
Every company has a different approach to managing e-mail.
According to StorageTek's Boey, most companies manage e-mail at the server (post-office) level by limiting the size of storage available to each user. "And a lot of users overcome that problem by downloading their e-mails into their personal computers or notebooks," he said.
SMBs also commonly set a maximum size limit for an e-mail, which provides some storage management but is "generally not an effective method", he added.
E-mail archiving is a standard feature in many commercial e-mail server systems, such as Microsoft Exchange. However, are they optimal for long-term management?
"By itself, Exchange has limited archiving and records management functionality, but Microsoft works with supporting partners to provide services and applications that back up, restore, archive and manage Exchange Server data."
"By itself, Exchange has limited ARM (archiving and records management) functionality, but Microsoft works with supporting partners, such as CA, EMC, HP, Legato Software and Veritas, to provide services and applications that back up, restore, archive and manage Exchange Server data," said Piff.
According to Piff, ARM products and services share three core features: centralized administration, selective retention and real-time search and retrieval.
In centralized administration, organizations can define policy-based retention rules and schedules to capture and store e-mail records.
Selective retention allows organizations to specific the criteria to filter out unnecessary or redundant e-mail. For example, filters can identify and ignore spam and duplicate messages so only important business e-mail is archived, Piff explained.
The third feature enables users to run full-text searches on any stored data, as well as retrieve the data in real-time with no temporal delay.
Another challenge is in the cost-effective management of e-mail server performance and reliability as the e-mail database grows, and an SMB has to decide what is the acceptable backup and restore time. Several storage management vendors offer technologies placing e-mail messages in a separate repository and on less-expensive storage media.
According to Yeong, most SMBs use standalone backup-to-tape systems to protect the data in the e-mail server. Some users centralize the e-mail data in a few e-mail servers. Others store most of their e-mail data on the client desktop or laptop machines, using the e-mail servers as transfer agents only.
Ajit Nair, EMC's technology solutions director for South Asia, said more education is needed for SMBs to understand the limitations of tape for backup and recovery.
He pointed out that the traditional backup method using tape uses significant server cycles and impacts the production server. "While the backup is being performed, the production server performance is degraded and the users will see a difference in how responsive their e-mail system is," he explained.
"With tape, recovering backed up data takes significantly longer," he added.
Nair recommends online backup and restore capabilities to reduce the time needed. "By creating replicas of the production data on the storage array, organizations can recover from server failures or database corruptions in a matter of minutes rather than hours," he noted. Storage array refers to a linked group of one or more independent hard disk drives generally used to replace larger, single disk drive systems.
EMC has a product targeted at SMBs that use Microsoft Exchange. Priced from US$43,000, the EMC Express solution for e-mail is designed and tested for up to 5,000 seats storing years of e-mail volume consolidated on a single storage array, Nair claims.
The product is said to reduce Microsoft Exchange total cost of ownership by up to 30 percent and reduce Exchange storage requirements by up to 70 percent.
Beyond e-mail
Wally Tung, an executive with IBM Asia-Pacific's Storage Networking, Systems and Technology Group, pointed out that data management and retention should not be limited to just one type of data e-mail but to other kinds of data that are important to the business. These include instant messages, voice mails, digitized photos and video, presentation slides, transaction logs, which IBM refers to as "retention managed data".
"The important requirement from our customers is that they need a way to retain and protect any kind of data for a variety of reasons. Hence, the more appropriate management term, retention managed data is used to represent the management characteristic rather than some data characteristic," explained Tung.
He also urged SMBs to start defining a strategy, as information management becomes a critical part of every businesses process.
"In compliance and data retention, the customer’s problems (pain) cannot simply be solved by a storage solution," noted Tung. "Compliance is not about buying a box or deploying software or engaging professional services. Compliance is a mandatory strategy that combines technology and services and includes both a data retention strategy as well as an internal philosophy."
# posted by MiDBA @ 11/29/2004 06:21:00 PM 
