All posts tagged Email Archiving

By on October 4, 2011

New Bloor Research into Email Archiving

Last week Bloor research released a new report: Email archiving best practices- a competitive overview of the major players and if you’re thinking about buying email archiving and want to compare vendors, it’s a great resource.

The report was authored by Fran Howarth, whom I last met in April at infosec and had a great conversation with. One of the things I really liked about Fran’s perspective on email archiving is that she doesn’t just look at it from a retention or compliance only basis. Fran believes that the productivity gains from effective email archiving are just as important when selecting an email archiving vendor:

Email is of vital importance as a communications and collaboration tool as it is one of the prime ways that business information is communicated and shared. This makes its storage and archiving a necessity for maintaining and improving productivity by being able to retrieve information as it is needed. Yet operational efficiency is not the only driver for investing in email archiving technology. Owing to the amount of business information that it contains, email constitutes the leading type of evidence requested for litigation purposes and its preservation is also essential for complying with the requirements of a variety of governmental and industry regulations.

For the comparison- Fran analyses:

  • Autonomy
  • Google (Postini)
  • LiveOffice
  • Microsoft
  • Mimecast
  • Sonian
  • Symantec
Each company is analysed on:
  • Company Background
  • Current Offering
  • Strategy
  • Market Presence
  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses

It’s a really interesting report- and available to download here.

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By on January 4, 2011

Email Archiving in 2011- what we might see

Our last set of predictions for 2011 may have some way to go before they become reality, but having spent a few moments searching for 2011 predictions on the Internet, I’m confident most of what is out there is a very long way off, if not a just a little scary too.

As this week is the first proper business week of 2011, I’m wondering what we are likely to see in the Email Archiving industry this year and if anything dramatic will shape its future.

In a highly un-scientific piece of research amongst my colleagues, the top issues I’m expecting to see in 2011 are as follows. By the way, I’m willing to take small wagers on their likelihood if you’re keen.

  • The Archiving Market will see Further Consolidation: The last couple of years saw the arching market consolidate drastically, even during the economic downturn. I expect that for email archiving vendors this consolidation will continue, and we will see some surprising shifts in the market. SaaS and Cloud vendors are likely to be at the top of the shopping list for many on-premise vendors.
  • Microsoft Exchange 2010 will go Mainstream: This blog has written many posts about the virtues of Exchange 2010, and rightly so. 2011 will see the large scale uptake of Exchange 2010 by mainstream organizations because of the new features it offers. Smart Businesses that have chosen not to archive to date, will use the migration to Microsoft Exchange 2010 as a catalyst to deploy a sustainable email archiving solution to ease migration headaches.
  • Goodbye to Stubbing Emails: Many legacy email archives support the stubbing or short-cutting of email attachments or body content as a mechanism to reduce Exchange store size. Since Exchange 2007, Microsoft has been persuading users away from this dead technology because of the problems it causes in later life for migration and retrieval. 2011 will be the year that businesses needs to decide what to do about the great stubbing problem. This is a problem that isn’t going away and needs to be addressed. More on this blog soon.
  • Say NO to Buying More Disks: For many organizations email archiving has been a way of life for years. Users continue to send and receive email, the archive continues to grow, disk space is eaten up at an alarming rate. To their hardware vendors delight and their CFOs despair, IT departments have continued to purchase more disk, and purchase more disk, and purchase more disk – or worse, start storing email on the SAN. 2011 should be the year the CFO says no to this maddening cycle, and asks the IT department to look for an alternative (he’s heard about Cloud). The IT department are likely to look at a cloud solution that doesn’t rely on local disk.
  • New Search Engine for Symantec Enterprise Vault: The search engine built into Symantec’s Enterprise Vault email archive has long been due for an upgrade. Rumor has it that Symantec are considering the Vivisimo Velocity search engine for a release later this year. This will mean a couple of things for users of Enterprise Vault. New 64bit hardware is likely to be needed, and data needs to be re-indexed – both of which are big jobs. Time to consider your options? More on this particular issue on this blog soon.
  • eDiscovery Becoming More and More Important: Already an important driver for many regulated or legal centric businesses, but I expect that 2011 will make eDiscovery a much more mainstream issue for businesses. New regulations in the US like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (and Consumer Protection) act are likely to put a much larger burden on relevant businesses, but the knock-on effect of this and all other regulations that require email archiving, retention and eDiscovery will finally start to trickle over into non-regulated organizations. As is popular in the UK and Europe, the retention of everything will start to become the norm in the US too. After-all, which CIO or even CEO wants to be unprepared in the face of someone who is far more so?
  • Cloud by default: Many of the issues above are caused by legacy technology. 2010 saw the Cloud make huge in-roads into corporate IT infrastructures. 2011 by contrast is likely to see the fine tuning of legacy services to utilize Cloud in much deeper integrations. (Note I said legacy services, not applications; the latter will be phased out as a result)  The most obvious advance we’ll see in 2011 is the use of Cloud or SaaS email archiving vendors, for the simple reasons that they are able to provide the same or better functionality as their LAN based aging-relatives, but without the requirement for on premise hardware or software.

So there you have it. 2011 in an email archiving nutshell. On Thursday this week, tune in for the same predictions on email security.

Happy New Year everyone.

for 2011 may have some way to go before they become reality, but having spent a few moments searching for 2011 predictions on the Internet, I’m confident most of what is out there is a very long way off, if not a just a little scary too.

As this week is the first proper business week of 2011, I’m wondering what we are likely to see in the Email Archiving industry this year and if anything dramatic will shape its future.

In a highly un-scientific piece of research amongst my colleagues, the top issues I’m expecting to see in 2011 are as follows. By the way, I’m willing to take small wagers on their likelihood if you’re keen.

  • Market Consolidation: The last couple of years saw the market consolidate, even during the economic downturn. I expect that for email archiving vendors this consolidation will continue, and we will see some surprising shifts in the market. SaaS and Cloud vendors are likely to be at the top of the shopping list for many.
  • Microsoft Exchange 2010: This blog has written many posts in support of Exchange 2010, and rightly so. 2011 will see the large scale uptake of Exchange 2010 by mainstream organizations, and as a result consideration of the new features it offers. Businesses that have chosen not to archive to date, will use the migration to Microsoft Exchange 2010 as a catalyst to deploy a sustainable email archiving solution.
  • Stubbing, or short-cutting: Many legacy email archives support the stubbing or short-cutting of email attachments or body content as a mechanism to reduce Exchange store size. Since Exchange 2007, Microsoft has been persuading users away from this dead technology because of the problems it causes in later life. 2011 will be the year that your business needs to decide what to do about the great stubbing problem. This is a problem that isn’t going away and needs to be addressed. More on this blog soon.
  • Disk space usage: For many organizations email archiving has been a way of life for years. Users continue to send and receive email, the archive continues to grow, disk space is eaten up at an alarming rate. To their hardware vendors delight and their CFOs despair, IT departments have continued to purchase more disk, and purchase more disk, and purchase more disk – or worse, start storing email on the SAN. 2011 is likely to be the year the CFO says no to this maddening cycle, and asks the IT department to look for an alternative. The IT department are likely to look at a cloud solution that doesn’t rely on local disk.
  • Symantec Enterprise Vault: The search engine built into Symantec’s Enterprise Vault email archive has long been due for an upgrade. Rumor has it that Symantec are considering the Vivisimo Velocity search engine for release later this year. This will mean a couple of things for users of Enterprise Vault. New 64bit hardware is likely to be needed, and data needs to be re-indexed – both of which are big jobs. More on this particular issue on this blog soon.
  • eDiscovery: Already an important driver for many regulated or legal centric businesses, but I expect that 2011 will make eDiscovery a much more main stream issue for businesses. New regulations like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (and Consumer Protection) act are likely to put a much larger burden on relevant businesses, but the knock on effect of this and all other regulations that require email archiving, retention and eDiscovery will finally start to trickle over into non-regulated organizations. As is popular in the UK and Europe, the retention of everything will start to become the norm in the US too. After-all, which CIO or even CEO wants to be unprepared in the face of someone who is far more so?
  • Cloud, SaaS and IaaS; Many of the issues above are caused by legacy technology and legacy thinking. 2010 saw the Cloud make huge in-roads into corporate IT infrastructures. 2011 by contrast is likely to see the fine tuning of legacy services to utilize Cloud in much deeper integrations. (Note I said legacy service, not applications; the latter will be phased out as a result)  The most obvious advance we’ll see in 2011 is the use of Cloud based or SaaS email archiving vendors, for the simple reasons that they are able to provide the same technology and functionality as their LAN based aging-relatives, but without the requirement for on premise hardware or software.

So there you have it. 2011 in an email archiving nutshell. On Thursday this week, tune in for the same predictions on email security.

Happy New Year everyone.

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CISSP, CCSK
Mimecast, North America.

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By on July 30, 2010

Retention, retention, retention…

Some of you have the luxury of a regulation that ‘dictates’ what you should retain and for how long; unfortunately many are not so lucky. The great unregulated masses are looking for answers, answers that are still defined as, alarmingly, grey areas. Let’s face it; when you are retaining data you’re worried, and when you’re not retaining it you’re worried that perhaps you should be.

Retention- A dam holding back water

The struggle

Retention whether driven by regulation, policy, mandate or ego has been a struggle and if you’re trapped under the deluge of data (especially email) you have my sympathy, I’ve been there too. Probably the most tricky situation to deal with, is when you’re working with an unclear retention policy.

Often I find IT managers and CIOs adhering to email retention guidelines handed down to them by a lawyer rather than a technologist; and all too often the policy is trying, and failing, to balance risk against reward and, perhaps legal protection. Added to this complex advice on retention the CIO has to build a solution that fits and remains in budget, budget of course that is never based on an oft overlooked metric – VOLUME!

I would suggest that predicting how much email your users will send in the next ten minutes is hard, predicting that volume for the next ten years is almost impossible.

Good luck planning your hardware budget for that. Perhaps attempting to save cost on hardware is one of the reasons why retention policies can be so diverse, even within the same organization?

I think the uncertainty surrounding email retention will remain, I say this because I often find different retention policies in organizations regulated by the same authority – like I said; alarming, and open to legal interpretation.

It is estimated that this year mankind will create 1200 Exabyte’s (billion GB)  of information, and that’s up from 150 Exabyte’s five years ago; with that growth we’re all going to need a lot more disk to cope with our insatiable appetite to hold onto the past.

Disk may be cheap, but do you really want the hassle?

Retention policy or not, your users are going to keep on generating data. A clear, plain English, succinct and unambiguous policy makes life easier but you’re still going to retain the data.

Retention is here to stay, so everyday is a the start of a new five/seven/ten/many years (delete as necessary) for your data, whether driven by a policy or not. We should be thinking about this as a forever-project rather than a five/seven/ten/many year retention project.

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By on July 20, 2010

Email Archiving Case Study: Townsend Manages Email in the Cloud [VIDEO]

Townsend uses a cloud-based approach for its email environment to lower email storage and to ensure email business continuity.  Their email is now archived off site automatically and their employees have continuous access to email even during power or network outages.

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By on July 19, 2010

Does the BP Oil Spill Make the Case for Automated Legal Holds?

The Gulf Oil Spill disaster has got me to thinking about legal holds, and the place that business workers have in the preservation workflow.  We have seen contention and opinion in several cases that responsibility for ensuring the ‘hold’ of ESI under a preservation obligation belongs more with someone in Legal than with the data custodians.  I think this applies in spades to the current BP situation. Continue Reading →

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By on July 19, 2010

4 Steps to Defensibility: Using an Email Archive

eDiscovery and general litigation readiness were the third major drivers to the Email Archiving industry.  The first two were Exchange/mailbox management and regulatory compliance for SEC/NASD compliance.

The archive held much promise because it proffered a way to minimize the pain that organizations were feeling around the preservation, collection and production of email.  If deployed and configured correctly, it would provide several benefits, most notable the ability to search ONE location for email. Continue Reading →

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By on June 23, 2010

Meet Dave- he manages email [VIDEO]

Dave is a busy email administrator, yet suddenly he seems to have a lot more time on his hands. Why? He no longer needs to worry about email archiving, email continuity and email security.

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