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Archive Today for a Secure Tomorrow

It’s no secret that email has become the lifeblood of the modern law firm: it has supplanted paper-based and verbal communications as the most critical single element of the communications infrastructure. And in other business sectors, the majority of companies now consider email a viable and trusted medium for taking orders, giving approvals, formalizing contracts and discussing sensitive personnel issues.

Consequently, the corporate email system now contains a great deal of sensitive information that once was stored only on paper. As dependence on email and its use have grown, so has the governmental and legal scrutiny regarding email. Email is now just as admissible in court, and just as critical for a firm to maintain, as paper-based records.

Complicating the issue is the rapidly increasing volume of email communications and other information contained within the messaging infrastructure. To make matters worse, there are literally thousands of data retention requirements being mandated in the United States and elsewhere. Deleting emails to save storage space is no longer an acceptable solution and has become a poor excuse if any legal actions are taken against a firm.

While regulatory compliance is a major factor in considering an archiving solution, it's not the only reason or even the primary reason that most firms consider email archiving. Capacity savings and performance are the most compelling reasons to contemplate archiving. Due to the increased use of email as the major method of communication, more and more email is sent and received on a daily basis. As the volume of email increases and users within a firm grow, the ability to manage mailboxes and storage space becomes more and more challenging. Archiving works by keeping the critical data on your local email store and moving older data to a secondary store. Centrally managed rules allow the firm to decide what's critical and what's not. Reducing the amount of data that's stored locally on the email store improves the performance of the email server. Not to mention, allowing for faster backups and restores.

Now that we have established a rationale for archiving, the next step is to see what products are out there that can assist the firm with implementing this solution. Archiving solutions can range from stripping attachments from email messages to an offline file store, to complex backup and retrieval systems involving CD or DVD jukeboxes. So how do you choose and implement archiving that's right for your firm?

The first step in selecting an archiving product is to decide what is driving the firm's need to archive. Then research the products that provide the capabilities you need. In doing so, make sure the archiving product integrates with your existing messaging and backup systems. Finally, other important factors to consider are the vendor’s technical support, response times in case of emergencies and, of course, price.

So who are the major players out there? Here is some information about several leaders in the industry.

C2C's ArchiveOne product is well known in the field today. It provides e-mail archiving, compliance, capacity and data management. ArchiveOne provides the ability to archive email based on the firm's needs, whether it is compliance or capacity based. ArchiveOne works by offloading all the emails to a secondary server and only leaving "stubs" on the primary servers that provide a link to the complete email. These "stubs" are approximately 1Kb in size. With this solution, the primary server remains clutter free and responsive. When a user clicks on a stub, ArchiveOne retrieves the email from the secondary server. ArchiveOne also lets administrators create policy based rules so only email meets the defined policies are offloaded to the secondary server. This allows the firm to keep critical data locally in the email store and move older data offline. ArchiveOne does not require any special client software and works with all versions of Exchange and Outlook.

Another key player is Connected Corporation's MailStore. It too meets all the requirements of compliance and capacity management. Similar to ArchiveOne, MailStore does not require any client or plug-in. The data access is controlled by a set of policies that ensure it can only be accessed by the correct party. MailStore provides single instance storage across the complete message space which means that only one message will be stored/archived instead of storing the same message from everyone's mailbox. MailStore works with Exchange, Lotus Notes and GroupWise.

Last, but not least, there's EDUCOM's EAS (Exchange Archive Solution). EAS is rich with features such as its Distributed Architecture. This allows users to manage their email regardless of their geographic location or by putting a load on the server or bandwidth. The Automatic Fail-Over and/or Load Balancing allows for fault tolerant operation. If the primary server fails for any reason, EAS automatically fails over to a secondary server and even transfers all its settings.

Clearly, there are several reasons to consider an email archiving solution. Deciding on which solution to implement will require review of the firm's business needs and goals. Whether it’s server performance, capacity savings, and conformance to regulations or all of the above, archiving email can be beneficial on a number of levels. To learn more about email archiving, or to discuss your particular needs, please contact us.

Please note the services and products mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect KKL's recommendation of the products or services listed. This listing is done for informational purposes only.