Office Memo 23
Office Memo 23
10 July 2006

Do I really need to archive all this email?
Has your company entered the world of email archiving or have it on the agenda for 2006? Have you asked yourself if you really want to archive all the email? Have you thought about how much email traffic your company sends and receives? Do you know how much this is increasing year on year and the impact this will cause on your storage?
The chances are that you don't. Everyone can relate how many emails they receive a day and compare that to the volume of email from a couple of years ago. What will this be in two years' time?
Storage managers are waking up to the realisation that email storage demands are huge. Despite attempts to curb users' demands, storage managers are fighting a losing battle and need to devote a large amount of storage to email.
The question that comes to the fore is whether the email truly needs to be archived. Is it simply easier to archive everything because no-one can be bothered to answer the question? Or is it that they can't see any easy way to clarify and then resolve the issues?
There are three main problems:
the volume of mail,
understanding the reasons for wanting to archive
the decision on what to archive.
Volume of email
We all know email volumes are high but quite how high, and what will it be next year? Industry analysts, such as Sara Radicati (www.radicati.com) and Michael Osterman (www.ostermanresearch.com), report that email volumes are increasing by around 20 to 25 per cent annually. Coupled to this is the increasing size of email. This is growing slightly more slowly, at around 15 to 20 per cent a year. Compounding these figures gives an annual increase in email data of around 40 per cent.
In other words, the amount of data is doubling roughly every two years. This is unremitting, with none of the analysts predicting a reduction in this rate of increase. This is way beyond the figures most storage managers and email system managers have been catering for.
Reasons for archiving
There are two approaches to archiving. The first is to take a secure copy of every mail as it is received by or leaves the user. This is usually known as compliance archiving. The other is to remove large or old emails from the system, typically by a process known as message-stubbing. This reduces the size of the message store and its drag on system performance.
Many people perform archiving without understanding why they began doing so. Differing objectives can exist. Legal and human resources departments might want every email retained for legal reasons, while system managers might want it for system capacity and performance reasons. The two do not necessarily coincide in terms of solutions.
There are many laws and industry regulations that either dictate to us or advise us to archive data. Some of them dictate for how long the data must be retained and even what to do on the expiry of the retention period. The laws and regulations usually show which job functions or departments these relate to, such as mergers and acquisitions or board level management of a quoted company.
Other laws apply more generally. Freedom of information laws require public bodies to retrieve information on almost any subject. Data protection laws require companies to be able to locate information related to a current or past employee.
There may also be the need to archive existing data, to relieve the burden on the messaging system. Some of this data could be more than five years old. Do we really need to archive this for corporate reasons, or for the users' own productivity needs? Does it instead remain in the system because the user simply did not delete it at the time? Such messages long forgotten and are no longer required.
Deciding what to archive
If you sift through all the laws and regulations that apply to your company, you can produce a matrix. This should separate out what is essential to retain, what is important to retain for user productivity and what is of no value at all.
When you have understood your reasons to archive and the data, employees and departments that need to archive, try looking at the problem in reverse. Ask what do you not want to archive. When you start making this list, you will you will start to see patterns of essential and inessential email.
To achieve this, you will need to exploit features of your archiving system. Multiple repositories will let you archive different sets of data to different locations. For example, employees' email can be archived to optical media, as it is unlikely to accessed with any frequency. This will aid in the overall management of the data and in its physical location. For example, do you need fast access near-line devices or off-line media?
Just as important is the ability to select which data is and is not archived. If you get it right, you can make a decision on which data should be deleted. Gaining agreement on from your legal department should not then be that onerous!
Does anyone apart from the marketing department really need to keep files types such as mp3, avi, mpg, wav? You would probably be surprised how much of this is stored in your email system. And once the data has been there for more than 60 days, the employee who retained it has probably forgotten about it. Of course, before you delete such data you need to ensure your written corporate e-policy states that `the company has the right to …..'
Creating a management policy
Understanding these various needs lets you can define your organization's archiving criteria. From here it should be a relatively simple step of creating a management policy for email. This should allow systems staff to identify and delete unwanted data before archiving the remainder to single or multiple repositories. Each of which could have its own retention periods.
The policy should be easy to set up and administer. It will reduce the volume of email to be stored and retained, reduce the processing and, more importantly, dramatically reduce the demands on storage.
Thinking about your ongoing archiving needs can reap benefits in the long term and improve the return on investment in your archiving decision.

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Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C Systems Ltd, contributed this article. Our thanks go to him. For further information contact C2C on (0)118 951 1211.
C2C is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2006. This is the United Kingdom's largest data storage event and takes place at Olympia, London, on 18 and 19 October 2006.


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