White PapersE-mail is the lifeblood of business today, with organizations relying on this tool to the same extent that they rely on the telephone or even electricity. For many organizations, if the e-mail system goes down, everyone knows about it, and the organization can grind to a halt. There are numerous reasons for this reliance on e-mail; however, the primary reason is that e-mail enables us to communicate more quickly, more broadly, more easily and less expensively than ever before.
As a result, globally we have embraced e-mail as a critical business tool. E-mail volumes continue to grow, and the size of the average e-mail message is increasing as we create larger attachments and incorporate rich media such as audio and video files. Radicati Group estimates that the daily average size of e-mail that is sent and received by an average corporate user will increase from 16.4 megabytes (MB) in 2006 to 21.4 MB in 2010—an increase of 25 percent over four years.
written byMartin Tuip,Product Manager,Windows ManagementQuest Software, Inc.Optimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational ValueWhite PaperUntitled Document WPW_OptimE-MailStorToDrvOrgVal_092106_NH Copyright Quest Software, Inc. 2006. All rights reserved. This guide contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. The software described in this guide is furnished under a software license or nondisclosure agreement. This software may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the applicable agreement. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any purpose other than the purchaser's personal use without the written permission of Quest Software, Inc. WARRANTY The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. Quest Software makes no warranty of any kind with respect to this information. QUEST SOFTWARE SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF THE MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Quest Software shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or other damage alleged in connection with the furnishing or use of this information. TRADEMARKS All trademarks and registered trademarks used in this guide are property of their respective owners. World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 www.quest.com e-mail: info@quest.com U.S. and Canada: 949.754.8000 Please refer to our Web site for regional and international office information. Updated September 21, 2006 Untitled Document i ABSTRACT This white paper explores how organizations need to balance the challenges of exploding e-mail storage with the ongoing need to maintain access to the valuable information contained within e-mail. This paper is intended to help messaging managers and directors understand the business issues associated with e-mail storage management, and approaches that can be taken to manage this storage while accommodating the needs of the wider business. Availability, compliance and migration are all challenges that can be addressed through optimizing e-mail storage management. Untitled Document ii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................1 CHARACTERISTICS OF EXISTING E-MAIL SYSTEMS ....................................3 SINGLE INSTANCE STORAGE ............................................................................. 3 The Different Flavors of Single Instancing ................................................... 4 END-USER E-MAIL CHALLENGES ........................................................................ 5 PROVIDING ACCESS TO E-MAIL DATA .................................................................. 7 BUSINESS DRIVERS FOR OPTIMIZING E-MAIL STORAGE MANAGEMENT.....8 AVAILABILITY............................................................................................... 9 DATA MIGRATION........................................................................................ 10 COMPLIANCE.............................................................................................. 11 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ............................................................................ 14 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ............................................................................... 15 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................18 ABOUT THE AUTHOR .................................................................................19 APPENDIX 1: BEST PRACTICES CHECKLIST...............................................20 ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC. ................................................................21 CONTACTING QUEST SOFTWARE....................................................................... 21 CONTACTING QUEST SUPPORT......................................................................... 21 Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 1 INTRODUCTION E-mail is the lifeblood of business today, with organizations relying on this tool to the same extent that they rely on the telephone or even electricity. For many organizations, if the e-mail system goes down, everyone knows about it, and the organization can grind to a halt. There are numerous reasons for this reliance on e-mail; however, the primary reason is that e-mail enables us to communicate more quickly, more broadly, more easily and less expensively than ever before. As a result, globally we have embraced e-mail as a critical business tool. E-mail volumes continue to grow, and the size of the average e-mail message is increasing as we create larger attachments and incorporate rich media such as audio and video files. Radicati Group estimates that the daily average size of e-mail that is sent and received by an average corporate user will increase from 16.4 megabytes (MB) in 2006 to 21.4 MB in 2010 an increase of 25 percent over four years. With this reliance comes risk. The growth of e-mail usage has obvious implications for mail servers and the managers and users of those servers. Availability, reliability and performance are all impacted by the growth of e-mail; however, the underlying symptom of these challenges is the increasing amount of storage that is consumed by e-mail. Factor in additional challenges, such as those relating to compliance or the need to migrate an e-mail system to another mail server platform or a new version of an existing solution, and it is obvious that e-mail storage management is an issue that impacts most areas of any typical organization. As these volumes increase, Information Technology (IT) and messaging administrators need to ensure that the e-mail system is up to the task. Sufficient storage needs to be available to store the e-mail data, while the performance of the system needs to be maintained in order to provide the business with the continuity it needs. In addition to supporting end users, it is likely e-mail is also used by other line of business applications that use the messaging system to transport alerts and information either between systems or to other end users. E-mail systems are inevitably being used as a repository for storing e-mail; however, they were never designed for this purpose. Rather, they were designed to perform the transaction of sending messages from one person to another. They were not designed to be long-term stores for this information. Point solutions address e-mail virus checking, archiving and general e-mail management, but there has been little attention paid to the corporate value of the information held inside e-mail and how optimizing the storage of e-mail can unlock this value. As outlined in the white paper Best Practices for Exchange Storage Management, storage management may be technically defined as: The practice of handling data residing on various devices in a secure and protected fashion and in a way that optimizes the storage of that data and its manipulation. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 2 Messaging servers of all kinds face similar issues, but in the case of Microsoft Exchange, storage management and the optimization of that storage is particularly concerned with managing: the e-mail data contained on the mail server itself, the data that is held on backup tapes and other media, end users PST files and, overall, how and where organizations want to use that information. The optimization of e-mail storage is therefore key to addressing a number of the key issues facing organizations today: " Ensuring the availability and ongoing performance of the mail server and its ability to process and provide access to e-mail on an ongoing basis " Managing e-mail data on an ongoing basis so that it is ready for migrating to another e-mail system, should this be a current or future business requirement " Providing access to the valuable intellectual property contained within the e-mail system and how this can complement other knowledge management initiatives " Maintaining a record of all e-mail data and providing timely access to this information to help address compliance and regulatory objectives " Using the e-mail data in multiple ways, broadening the benefits that organizations can get out of their e-mail data, including its ability to contribute to business intelligence This paper is intended to help messaging managers and directors understand the business issues associated with e-mail storage management and approaches that can be taken to manage this storage, while accommodating the needs of the wider business. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 3 CHARACTERISTICS OF EXISTING E-MAIL SYSTEMS Many of the e-mail storage management challenges facing organizations today stem from the way in which the current e-mail systems process and store e-mail. Single Instance Storage Single instance storage was a significant feature that was shipped with Microsoft Exchange 4.0 when it became available in March 1996. Ten years later, this feature has become an important piece of many e-mail and e-mail management solutions, including e-mail archiving software solutions. Understanding how single instance storage works is important when looking at how the overall storage management of e-mail can be optimized. The objective of single instance storage is to ensure a message sent to multiple recipients is only stored in the e-mail system once and therefore creates storage savings. Looking at this in more detail, when a message contains exactly the same data as another message, single instance storage can replace the multiple references to these identical messages by references to a single stored copy of the file. This can potentially save large amounts of space in systems with many copies of the same file. Microsoft Exchange uses single instance storage to eliminate duplicate copies of a message. The reduction occurs at the Microsoft Exchange store level, so when mailboxes that receive a specific message exist across multiple Exchange stores, each store will have one copy of the message. In other words, in a Microsoft Exchange environment, single instancing is only effective within a single Exchange store it does not, and will not in the foreseeable future, support single instancing across multiple stores. Secondly, the Exchange store will only single instance messages and not the attachments within those messages. As an example, single instancing will occur if a user sends a message, with an attachment to 20 users on the same store: the attachment will only be stored once. But, as soon as the message is modified (for example, it is forwarded or opened and modified in the mailbox), another copy of the attachment is stored in Exchange. Then, if the message with the attachment is sent to 20 people on the same store, and five of those people forward the message, the result is that six copies of that specific attachment are stored in Exchange. The issue compounds itself the more times the attachment is sent each time a separate, additional copy of the message, including the attachment, is stored in the e-mail system. The upshot: while Exchange single instancing is effective at reducing overall message storage, it does not significantly improve the overall storage used by attachments. Yet research indicates that 85 percent of an e-mail server s storage consists of attachments. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 4 The Different Flavors of Single Instancing When it comes to e-mail management, many e-mail archiving products purport to deliver single instancing, yet they can actually provide greater levels of single instancing than currently provided with Microsoft Exchange or other message server platforms, for that matter. Some e-mail archiving products provide a higher level of single instancing they single instance not only the message, but also the attachments contained within those messages. These solutions not only look at the message as a whole when single instancing, but process the body and attachments separately. Figure: Message flow and single instance storage If this type of product was involved in the example above, the original message would be stored once, and it would appear in the user s Sent Items and in the inboxes of 20 recipients of the message. What s different is that the attachment would be stored only once. Furthermore, while the five forwarded messages would be stored as five different messages (they would each be unique, as they were from different senders), the attachment would not be stored again. So, instantly, instead of storing six attachments as Exchange has, a product that single instances attachments would store only one. Assuming the attachment doesn t change, only a single copy would ever be stored, regardless of how many messages contained that attachment or when they were sent. In addition to the obvious storage reductions that occur and the subsequent cost savings that accrue, there are other indirect benefits of optimizing single instance storage in this way. By identifying unique attachments, organizations can now mine and model the data that is captured and stored. It could, for example, provide a customer with a detailed list of which people received a specific document within a specific time or date range, helping address an organization s compliance objectives. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 5 End-User E-Mail Challenges One of the many challenges for IT staff supporting Microsoft Exchange is how to deal with rapid growth in users mailboxes. End users are increasingly used to receiving mailboxes with large mailbox quotas from their consumer e-mail service providers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Google s Gmail service, for example, has a 2.7 gigabyte (GB) mailbox quota, which the provider is always looking to increase. When it comes to the corporate world, e-mail administrators have no choice but to keep a tight rein on mailbox sizes. Research indicates that, on average, organizations limit users mailboxes to 100 MB, and the average limit on message size is 10 MB. That is substantially smaller than the 2 GB offered by consumer e-mail sites. Administrators currently need to control the storage of e-mail in this way because, unlike the consumer systems, performance and availability need to be guaranteed and because of the time required to back up and restore e-mail data. Larger mailboxes will inevitably open more slowly than a smaller-sized mailbox, causing potential headaches for the end users. Additionally, the mail server itself may not be capable of serving such high volumes of e-mail data to its end users, impacting its performance. The main reason why organizations restrict mailbox size is due to the time needed to back up and restore mailboxes. Free consumer e-mail sites don t provide backup and restore capabilities. In order to maintain a reasonable time window for the backups to complete, e-mail databases must be small enough to fit into that backup window. The same holds true for restore times. Giving every user a 2 GB mailbox would quickly result in unmanageable backup and restore times. In reality, mailbox quotas greater than 500 MB are simply impractical for most medium- to large-size organizations. There are typically two options available to end users: delete the messages to create space, which could contravene any regulations that are in place, or use an additional source to store this excess information. Regardless, both approaches create risk, and the time involved in this overhead can be significant, impacting worker productivity. It is important to remember that end users are paid to work, not to manage e-mail. End users who want to have access to more e-mail than their e-mail server will provide usually resort to using Microsoft Personal Folder (or PST) files, which provide a way for Microsoft Outlook users to store excess e-mail messages. However, from a storage management perspective, this can place additional pressures on infrastructure and impact the degree of control an organization has over this data. Also, once a message has been offloaded from the mailbox on the server to the desktop, e-mail content becomes scattered across disparate computers, making it difficult, if not impossible, to find e-mail messages again for legal discovery. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 6 While using PST files ensures users are able to create space, there are some issues: " Poor performance and limited accessibility of PST files stored on networks " Loss of single-instance store advantage when messages are migrated to PST files " PST file corruption, especially with large PSTs, requiring technical support resources to fix " Increased cost of administration to find lost information when corrupt PSTs can t be fixed " PST files need to be online to search, and search tools are usually poor " They are not secure anyone can access the content of a PST file using the right tools " Uncontrolled growth of storage required to hold escalating PST files " Inability to back up network PST files which are left open by users " Inability to take advantage of incremental backup facilities because PST is a single file " PST is under private control rather than being a corporate resource In short, there are few options for users that enable them to keep e-mail for long periods of time, and access it again as and when they need it. While PST files deliver a solution that helps the end user, they can create all kinds of issues for the administrator and the wider organization. The productivity of end users is also affected by the poor search tools that are available with standard e-mail client software packages such as Microsoft Outlook. The built-in capabilities are poor, work slowly and do not provide the power of other search capabilities that users are familiar with, such as Google or Yahoo! End users may be able to rectify this situation by using one of the third-party tools that is available on the market, and this will have an immediate and short-term impact on productivity. From an organizational perspective, however, these tools do not provide the over-arching search capabilities that are required to satisfy compliance and knowledge management requirements: the tools only work on an individual level and not at an organizational level. This is the case even without considering the disparate nature of where this e-mail data may be stored. Organizations need to locate and control the usage of PST files and determine an appropriate strategy for providing access to all e-mail data at both an individual and organizational level. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 7 Providing Access to E-Mail Data These existing systems are proficient at transacting e-mail messages; however, these systems make it difficult to access the e-mail data. Typically, e-mail is held in a proprietary store, focused on the individual message sender. While one person can send a message to another person or group, it is difficult for this communication to be shared with others or the organization as a whole. As a result, the valuable knowledge and information contained within e-mail is lost to the organization and can potentially never be used. These limitations can be summarized as follows: LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT SYSTEMS IMPACT Messages are stored in a proprietary, hierarchical store. Organizations cannot search across multiple users. Other applications are unable to easily access e-mail information; if they need to use the information, they duplicate it. Lack of message metadata means that once they have been archived, messages are difficult to discover. The process of discovery is very time consuming and imprecise, and this is compounded by the weakness of the search tools. Use of an inefficient storage model, which results in a duplication of data. The entire e-mail database needs to be backed up and managed constantly. Microsoft Outlook PST files result in messages being stored in multiple locations. There is no visibility, for organizations, of the knowledge being retained or lost. Storage is impacted when messages are stored in multiple locations. E-mail is too valuable of an asset to organizations today to remain locked away in a proprietary, non-optimized data store. Organizations need to maximize their usage of e-mail in order to retain and reuse corporate knowledge and to comply with legislative regulations. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 8 BUSINESS DRIVERS FOR OPTIMIZING E-MAIL STORAGE MANAGEMENT When it comes to e-mail storage management, most people immediately write the issue off as being the concern of the IT department. While there is some truth to that assertion, it is largely inaccurate. Due to the reliance everyone in a typical organization has on e-mail, the impact of this issue on the well-being of their e-mail system, and the benefits most key stakeholders can realize when e-mail storage is optimized, this issue is more broad-ranging than most people think. Without understanding the issue and the broader impacts on the organization, organizations run the risk of putting their heads in the sand and ignoring an issue that could come back to haunt them in the months and years to come. For a variety of reasons, the current mail server platforms do not store e-mail in an optimized way, nor do they provide capabilities for end users to manage their own e-mail in a way that can be managed by the organization. For every plus there is a corresponding minus concerning the current approaches for managing e-mail storage. In addition to the IT stakeholder, there are a number of key stakeholders that can be directly or indirectly impacted by the poor storage management of e-mail data. These include the CxO or other senior management, who are legally bound to retain records of business communication including e-mail for periods of time, and then be able to provide this information in a timely way when required. Similarly, other roles, such as the CIO and knowledge manager, are concerned with maintaining corporate knowledge, ensuring this is available to other people in the organization, both now and in the future. All of these roles rely on the optimized storage management of e-mail in order to perform their jobs and, in the case of compliance, prevent legal action. The costs are more far-reaching than the IT-focused issues that immediately come to mind. This document explores how optimizing e-mail storage can deliver benefits in five key areas: " Availability " Data Migration " Compliance " Knowledge Management " Business Intelligence Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 9 Availability For almost every organization, e-mail has become a mission-critical system and even short e-mail disruptions can cost significantly in terms of productivity and financial losses. As a result, administrators of messaging systems face tremendous pressure to promptly rectify issues that might occur with these systems and to ensure that the e-mail system remains continuously operational. Managing this e-mail storage effectively is, therefore, critical to ensuring the ongoing availability of the e-mail system and ensuring that the organization can address the wider needs of the business that are associated with e-mail. Ballooning storage utilization is a key factor when availability is impacted. By consuming storage space, the mail server will struggle to store new e-mail being processed, and its overall performance will be impacted. Simply deleting the e-mail data is not an option, as there are often laws and regulations which stipulate that e-mail as a form of business communication must be retained for a specific length of time. The penalties for non-compliance are high and may involve significant fines or even jail time for executives that do not ensure compliance. As the volume and size of e-mail messages continue to increase and users campaign for additional storage space, the administrator has to determine how to provide for this growth without compromising the quality of service that is required by the business. Third-party mailbox management products allow organizations to control how much information is stored in the e-mail server, while some e-mail archiving products capture messages and store them in a separate system, providing access to the archived messages directly through the mail server. In some cases, message shells are used in order to replace the messages in the mail server with shells of those messages. Using this approach, users can still view a list of e-mail messages, including the subject line and sender details, within their e-mail client, but when they access an archived message, the message is retrieved from the archive instead of being stored in the mail server itself. The message shell is usually 5 to 10 KB in size, regardless of the size of the original message, significantly reducing the size of the message as far as the mail system is concerned. Administrators can set policies that determine at what timeframe a message is archived or shelled from the messaging system and can therefore aggressively control how much information stays in the messaging system on a day-to-day basis. By optimizing storage in this way, and reducing or maintaining the size of the messaging system store, organizations can maintain their existing backup windows, while effectively providing users with a larger mailbox. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 10 Additionally, because the size of a shelled message is considerably smaller than the original message, overall performance and availability of the mail server will be improved because there is less data being stored and transferred each time the users access their mailboxes. Over time, the end users mailboxes will eventually fill up with shells, so organizations also need to implement a policy to manage these. To allow administrators the appropriate time to properly diagnose and resolve the issues surrounding an outage, end users e-mail functionality must be continuously available during an outage. Organizations can invest in high-availability solutions for their mail server platforms, or invest in third-party tools to either provide comparable availability or provide alternative access to the e-mail data, protecting the organization should the e-mail server become unavailable. Data Migration Migrating e-mail data from one platform to another is a great opportunity to optimize the storage of e-mail data; however, there are a number of key considerations. Growing e-mail volumes can make migrating from one e-mail platform to another challenging. Migrating all data runs the risk of having messages in the system that are not associated with current users, forcing administrators to add users that have left the organization to a directory, thereby reducing the cleanliness of that directory. The degree of migration e.g. migrating to a new platform, as opposed to migrating to a new version of an existing platform can also impact how users access this information. They may currently use client software that is not appropriate to use or simply will not work with a new messaging system. Care needs to be given as to how users continue to use their e-mail data, both the active e-mail data that is available on the mail server, as well as any PST files that are available. By collecting the e-mail and optimizing the storage of those messages, the overall complexity and risk of an e-mail migration project can be avoided. The most obvious place to start any migration is to analyze and understand what information is stored within the current production e-mail system. If an organization is migrating from a system that has been around for several years, it will inevitably contain messages to and from people who have since left the organization. Organizations need to determine how to manage this type of information because migrating all of the data to the new e-mail system will possibly mean creating the details of past users in the new environment. Deleting the information may be an option, but one that should involve legal input because the organization and/or its executive may be liable if it cannot produce information in a timely manner. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 11 By removing messages that are older than a particular timeframe and migrating them to an alternative solution (e.g. an e-mail archiving solution), there will be a smaller amount of e-mail to migrate. This will have an impact on the overall speed of the migration it will be faster thereby, reducing the risk of error and ensuring a migration can occur within any allocated business windows. In addition to dealing with information that is already in the mail system, a similar approach can be adopted with information stored on backup media or in end users PST files. Regardless of the format, organizations must be able to access this information in a timely manner, mainly for compliance purposes. To ensure timely access, organizations need a plan when it comes to accessing this data from media and file types that may not be supported by the system to which the organization is migrating. Options here include maintaining a server or virtual environment that contains previous versions of the e-mail server software, and this environment can be used for accessing backup tapes. Alternatively, organizations could migrate data from these types to a third-party product, such as an e-mail archiving solution, and this could be used to ensure access to not only the past e-mail data but also to new data that is being transacted on an ongoing basis. A similar approach can be used for PST files, by maintaining some level of access to the necessary client-side software that can read and provide access to the different PST file formats that may be available. In this case, a third-party product could be used to locate the PST files that are being used and/or stored within the organization and consolidate these files into an e-mail archive. PST migrations, or ingestions as they are sometimes called, are a complex and lengthy process. Where possible, PST file creation should be prevented in an organization in order to minimize the impact these have. Compliance Regulatory and compliance issues have become the single most important driver for the implementation of mail server storage management solutions. Indeed, the failure to implement an effective storage management framework is probably the biggest consideration that promotes its implementation. IT-focused readers may contend that compliance is an issue for business owners and managers to worry about; however, that is not necessarily the case. While IT may not be legally responsible for the capture and supply of e-mail data, it is highly likely that IT will be called upon to facilitate these services. In general terms, the typical compliance challenges affecting e-mail relate to the regular capture and storage of e-mail data to ensure a definitive record of communication exists and to ensure the ability to search and provide access to this information in a timely way often within hours. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 12 With limited IT resources, using the existing e-mail system, it is common for e-mail messages to not be retained. Therefore, they cannot be located when required. Most companies do not grant easy access to users, and 81 percent of companies do not allow users to access the archives without assistance from an IT administrator. Whether a message is purged to make space, accidentally deleted or gets corrupted, users often find themselves needing to access a backup copy. This translates to an average of six hours per week of administration time to assist end users with retrieving older e-mail, and it often takes an average of five hours to complete a system backup. This means that administrators must plan well ahead when addressing backup procedures, further burdening their valuable time. These requirements have given rise to the e-mail archiving product category, which allows organizations to capture information and manage its lifecycle, while often providing powerful search capabilities across this information for both end users and administrators. Many e-mail archiving systems include sophisticated content indexing and searching functionality so that individual e-mails can be identified and retrieved and connected e-mail threads can be identified. This ability to easily identify and retrieve individual items is critical. Simply archiving content to backup tapes on a nightly basis and retaining those tapes for the retention period may not satisfy the above provisions. While most backup and restore products are effective at backing up this data, they are not considered complete compliance solutions: " A backup may occur on a daily basis, meaning that there will be no record of e-mail data that has been received and deleted during that day the backup may not be complete. " The growth of the e-mail store can make backing up the e-mail data a time-consuming process, while the restoration of e-mail data can also be very time consuming and require significant personnel and system resources. " The data that is backed up may be in a proprietary format, and in a few years' time, for example there may not be an easy way of accessing and viewing the data stored on these backup tapes. " Some e-mail may be backed up multiple times, across several days, weeks and months, requiring significant effort to sort through when messages need to be restored and located. Legislation has emerged in recent years in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and, to some extent, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) that determines how data should be managed. With specific regard to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation (also administered by the SEC) the law states that electronic records (including e-mails) relating to business must be retained for not less than five years with the most relevant section being Section 802(a). Section 802(a) effectively defines that such records must be maintained in non-rewritable and non-erasable formats. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 13 In most cases, the penalties for non-compliance are severe, with fines in the order of 250,000 (HIPAA) and imprisonment terms of not more than 20 years (Sarbanes-Oxley). For the most part, Sarbanes-Oxley is applicable to publicly traded companies, but even small- and mid-sized accounting firms must make provision for compliance pursuant to Section 209 of the Act. Similarly, the HIPAA regulations apply to any organizations (healthcare providers, hospitals, healthcare billing establishments, etc.) that communicate or otherwise utilize protected health information (PHI) relating to an individual (i.e., confidential patient data). To demonstrate the significant nature of the penalties, the table below details some of the more high profile e-mail-related cases in recent years there are many others in addition to these. Although these are all U.S.-based cases, similar legislation is in place in most countries in Europe and Asia, while organizations that are subsidiaries of U.S.-based companies typically also have to comply with the U.S. legislation. ORGANIZATION FINE DETAILS Morgan Stanley 1.45B Coleman Holdings v. Morgan Stanley (2005) Failure to produce e-mail evidence Bank of America (2004) 10M SEC Settlement Failure to produce e-mail evidence Philip Morris 2.75M United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc. (2004) Spoliation (deletion of 60-day old e-mail for two years) J.P. Morgan (2005) 2.1M SEC, NASD, NYSE Settlement Spoliation of e-mail Like other forms of documentation, an e-mail is a record defined as any piece of data, in any form, created or received in connection with the transaction of an organization s business. Organizations need to ensure that they have policies and tools in place that provide for the storage and retrieval of these records. Organizations must also identify how long these records should be preserved, in order to comply with regulations. By optimizing the way in which e-mail data is stored, a greater amount of e-mail data can be stored, using fewer resources, while the information itself can be structured to provide a greater level of access, further helping to meet the compliance requirements of an organization. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 14 Knowledge Management Enterprise Strategy Group estimates that 75 percent of an organization s intellectual property is stored in its messaging system; yet, as we ve discussed, this valuable information is typically not effectively managed. These large personal libraries of e-mail messages are of growing interest to management who wish to leverage this information and are concerned about the company s exposure to costly legal discovery processes. In many cases, the organization s intellectual property is either being deleted, or it is inaccessible to the organization. Where do these messages go? Often they are either deleted or are moved into a local archive file. As a result, the messages are permanently removed from the system or are difficult to access. This presents significant problems for corporations wishing to leverage the amount of information captured within those e-mail messages. Typical e-mail systems provide archiving capabilities that are inadequate solutions for effective long-term message archiving. As outlined elsewhere in this paper, PST files create a fragmented corporate record and make complete percent visibility a near impossibility. And while the message server allows companies to store messages, retrieval without requiring additional effort and expense is next to impossible. Anyone who has used an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook is aware of how challenging it is to locate the information they need, whether that information is contained within the e-mail message itself or within attachments that have been transported in the e-mail system. This issue is compounded at an organizational level, where administrators may be directed to search across multiple users. They may end up searching on a user-by-user basis, which can be time consuming and, in many cases, fruitless, as e-mail may have been removed from the system. While there are third-party tools available to help users search their personal e-mail, these only operate at an individual level they don t enable a user to search another user s e-mail, nor do they allow sufficiently permitted users to perform a global search. Organizations require a solution that ensures all intellectual property is maintained, that it can be easily located across the entire organization and that both messages and their attachments can be stored efficiently and effectively. Consequently, the ability to utilize e-mail from a knowledge management perspective has many of the same fundamental requirements as a compliance solution: the ability to systematically capture all e-mail and the ability to search across all of this e-mail in a timely way. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 15 Storage optimization is a key contributor to success in this area. By storing an ever-increasing amount of e-mail as efficiently as possible and structuring this information in an optimal way, both end users and the wider organization can maintain the high level of access to the corporate knowledge that they need to do their jobs and differentiate themselves in the market. Solutions that capture the e-mail data, structure it in a way that makes it easy to store and search, and then provide additional tools that enable users to search this information are all key to ensuring corporate knowledge is maintained. There are multiple approaches to achieving these objectives, and organizations that are cognizant of the need to protect their knowledge for compliance reasons as well as knowledge management should understand their overall e-mail management objectives and how these tie in with any other knowledge management solutions that may be available. The broader industry movement toward adopting enterprise content management (ECM) solutions has been considered one way to provide controlled access to information; however, these types of solutions are often more suited to documents and other collaborative file types. The volume of e-mail data processed by most organizations can make it unsuitable for ECM solutions, while the cost of implementation can be prohibitive (although these solutions can have broader value across the organization). The main weakness is that while these systems may be able to store this information, often this act simply creates additional silos of information and further duplication. Similarly, while document management systems are effective at managing office documents, they are perceived by many as not being suitable for e-mail and their attachments. Critics of document management systems consider the overhead of manually profiling every incoming or outgoing e-mail to be impractical. If users do not profile e-mail, then the overall value of the solution diminishes. Lastly, there are specialist e-mail archiving and management solutions on the market that are able to efficiently store the e-mail data and then provide search access to this. These solutions may work either on a standalone basis or in conjunction with other solutions that look to manage more than e-mail. Business Intelligence In addition to the significant amount of knowledge that is contained in the e-mail system, the context of how this information is used and its importance to the wider organization are key considerations when determining its value. When looking at knowledge management, often it is the body of the message and any associated attachments that contain the underlying knowledge, while the details about who sent that information may only be important in the context of understanding how qualified or important the person was who sent it. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 16 While this knowledge undoubtedly has value to both the end users and the organization, there are other component parts of the e-mail message that contain additional data that is of value. Despite the free-flowing form of e-mail messages, there is a significant amount of structure associated with e-mail data. As depicted below, the standard e-mail message comprises a number of parts: metadata, such as the To: and From: information and subject line, and the date on which the e-mail was sent or received; any attachments, which are treated as files, regardless of the type of attachment; and the underlying security surrounding who has access to that e-mail message. Figure: Putting structure into unstructured information When stored optimally, this information can be accessed in different ways, enabling new levels of value to be derived from this information. For instance, if the e-mail metadata is stored in a relational database and the files in an associated file system, this enables organizations to access and analyze the information in different ways. The views of this information may be tailored to deliver business value beyond which it was originally intended. For example, in the early part of this decade there was significant investment made in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which offered businesses the potential of providing a comprehensive view of all customer interactions within an organization. The assumption was that if you could understand your customer relationships, then this could result in targeted sales and marketing activity, improving revenue and profitability. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 17 The main impediment of these systems was that they relied on humans to use them effectively. Details of interactions typically had to be added manually, and the volume of the average person s activity meant that there were often gaps in the information that was entered. Additionally, people were often selective about what information to add or omit (good news was often added, while bad news was not). In other words, most of these systems did not provide an accurate reflection of the status of a customer relationship and the activities that surrounded that relationship. E-mail is both an enabler and a disabler in this situation. While e-mail is an inexpensive and easy way to communicate, its ease of use means that we send a lot of it. In the context of using a CRM system, users need to be disciplined to copy e-mail messages into their records. Often, and largely due to the volume of information, this simply does not happen. Organizations that have implemented CRM and other associated line of business applications should understand how e-mail interacts with these systems now and whether additional value can be derived by integrating the e-mail data. Many organizations are required to capture and store this information for compliance purposes, and integrating this same data with other applications can enable a greater return on investment, while increasing the value of the line of business application itself. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 18 CONCLUSION In summary, in this white paper we have provided you with an overview of how optimizing the storage of e-mail can help drive additional value across the organization. We have looked at the common e-mail storage issues facing organizations today and the reasons why these issues are impacting organizations abilities to address their common business requirements. Lastly, in this document we looked at how the optimization of e-mail storage can deliver benefits in five key areas: " Availability " Data Migration " Compliance " Knowledge Management " Business Intelligence Organizations that want to use this information to their advantage need to have an understanding of their overall business requirements, their existing e-mail environment and the associated archives and other repositories that may be available, and how e-mail interacts with the organization and could add value. Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 19 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Martin Tuip is a Product Manager in the Windows Management group at Quest Software, and has been an Exchange Server "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) since 2000. Martin has worked as an Exchange consultant for many years, previously helping organizations architect and deploy Exchange Server and Active Directory, as well as e-mail archiving and compliance solutions. He has been a technical editor for Windows IT Pro and is a published author. Martin has represented Microsoft several times in the Ask the Experts area at TechEd and at various Microsoft Exchange conferences. Martin has been working with Exchange since 1996 and is the Webmaster of www.sharepointserver.com and www.exchange-mail.org, and the list owner of several Exchange- and Windows-related discussion groups. Untitled DocumentOptimizing E-mail Storage to Drive Organizational Value 20 APPENDIX 1: BEST PRACTICES CHECKLIST Consolidate Your Storage Management Knowledge Understand Your Current and Future Storage Management Requirements Understand How Single Instancing Works and the Different Flavors of Single Instancing Understand the Content of Your Mail Server and Other Archives (e.g. back-up tapes, PST files) Understand How E-mail Is Being Used Understand Legal and Regulatory Requirements Conduct Inventory of Backups Establish and Enforce Policies Determine Migration Approach and Optimize E-Mail Data Before Migrating Consolidate Overall E-Mail Storage Where Possible Locate, Manage and Control PST and Archive Files Select and Review E-Mail Management Solutions to Optimize E-mail Identify Line of Business Applications for Integration Review Content/Document Management Initiatives and How E-mail Fits In Untitled DocumentWhite Paper 21 ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC. Quest Software, Inc. delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and Windows infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 18,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com. Contacting Quest Software Phone: 949.754.8000 (United States and Canada) Email: info@quest.comMail: Quest Software, Inc. World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 USA Web site www.quest.comPlease refer to our Web site for regional and international office information. Contacting Quest Support Quest Support is available to customers who have a trial version of a Quest product or who have purchased a commercial version and have a valid maintenance contract. Quest Support provides around the clock coverage with SupportLink, our web self-service. Visit SupportLink at http://support.quest.comFrom SupportLink, you can do the following: " Quickly find thousands of solutions (Knowledgebase articles/documents). " Download patches and upgrades. " Seek help from a Support engineer. " Log and update your case, and check its status. View the Global Support Guide for a detailed explanation of support programs, online services, contact information, and policy and procedures. The guide is available at: http://support.quest.com/pdfs/Global Support Guide.pdf
