E-mail archiving

An e-mail archiving system defines which e-mail messages need to be archived, migrates the messages to the most economical and efficient storage media, and automatically deletes messages when they are no longer needed.

Policy-based e-mail archiving software applications allow IT managers to manage large e-mail archives, as well as freeing up space on production servers and speeding up backup times. These applications typically include:

• indexing and search capabilities
• access logs to provide a "virtual paper trail" in the event of removal or deletion of an e-mail
• a lifecycle management component for e-mail classification

A data classification exercise has to be performed in order to work out data is held by the organisation, which data types have to be protected in the archive, and what retention rules are to be applied.

Why archive e-mails?

Analyses show that 80 per cent of primary storage is rarely accessed.

In the past, companies often relied on end-users to maintain their own individual e-mail archives. The IT department would back up e-mail, but not in a way that made messages searchable. If a specific e-mail needed to be traced, it often took weeks to find. With today's compliance legislation, it has become necessary for many IT departments to manage their entire company's e-mail archiving in bulk so that specific messages can be located in minutes, not weeks.

We see several reasons to implement an e-mail archive:

• To maintain large amounts of data that do not require frequent access
• To ensure that relevant data is retained in order to comply with internal and/or external regulatory requirements.
• To reduce costs; archiving storage is based on low-cost disk drives.
• Using CAS systems (Content Addressable Storage) as storage for archives may be implemented correctly, excluding backups. The number of copies of the archived objects and distribution of the CAS cluster nodes form the basis for this.

Depending on the vendors’ implementation, there are varying functionalities in the e-mail archiving software. These are the most common ones:

• Mailbox archiving. This function is used to reduce the size of the mail store - thereby meeting the first need for implementation of an e-mail archiving solution - for both public and private mailboxes. This helps to reduce backup times and restore times in the event of a major problem. The text element may also be translated into pure text, indexed and made available for future search and retrieve purposes.
• Journaling. This function is used to comply with internal and external regulations. All incoming and outgoing e-mail is copied to the Exchange Journaling mailbox. The e-mail archiving software reads this mailbox and stores the e-mail items on relevant storage media on the basis of predefined rules. The text element is also translated into pure text, indexed and made available for future search and retrieve purposes.
• PST migration. The number and size of PST files in an organisation may exceed the size of the online Exchange database. When on central fileservers, they are backed up on a regular basis. When on workstations, they are probably not backed up at all. In both instances the information they contain may be mission-critical, yet not available. Once migrated, translated and indexed, the information will be removed from the previous location and made available for search and retrieve purposes.

Proact

Archiving is a key focus area for Proact, and e-mail archiving is probably the easiest and most cost-effective place to start implementation of an archive.