Chapter 1. Getting to Know Archiving Systems

Transcription

1 Chapter 1 Archiving Basics In This Chapter Understanding basic archiving systems Choosing between on-premise, hosted, and hybrid solutions Understanding the storage benefits of archiving Looking at the benefits of recovery with archiving Discovering how archiving increases user productivity The term archive doesn t conjure long, stuffy halls full of banker boxes and papers anymore. Even something as seemingly nebulous as can be archived, indexed, and ready to produce on short notice. An archiving system is simply a stand-alone application that works with your server to help you manage . For example, archiving captures and preserves all mailbox activity from the server. Archiving processes the data and stores it on magnetic disk storage in such a way as to make the quickly searchable. When the need does arise to search historical for internal investigations or for a court-ordered legal discovery, you can search millions of records in seconds by using search tools embedded in the archiving system. Getting to Know Archiving Systems So, you think you may need an archiving system. You may be surprised how many of the challenges you face in managing your server can be greatly improved with the help of archiving. For years, administrators have turned to archiving to solve their most pressing problems.

2 8 Part I: Getting to Know Archiving Take the quiz in the sidebar A quick quiz to see whether you need an archiving system. However, we suspect that you may already know that you need a system since you picked up this book. archiving can help solve some of the most challenging problems facing your organization with regard to management. users send and receive hundreds of s each day and demand unlimited mailbox capacity and fingertip access to years worth of . archiving solutions can improve storage efficiency by de-duplicating messages so that only one copy exists and removing and attachments from the messaging server based on administrator-defined storage policies, all while preserving access to end-users. For litigation support (such as ediscovery) and internal investigations, archiving solutions allow compliance and legal officers to easily search stored in the archive and avoid the costly exercise of searching backup tapes. A pop quiz on the first day? Don t panic. This is easy. To help you understand if the challenges you face in managing can be addressed by archiving, answer true or false to the following statements: Users are constantly asking for more mailbox capacity. HR is calling you to search and you re in a panic. A major lawsuit is pending and records are part of it. Your server is full and you need to add five new employees. Industry regulations require that you preserve for five years. A quick quiz is being lost in local PST files. Attachment files are filling your server. Your server just plain runs slow! If you said true to any of these questions, you have an management challenge. The more often you said true, the bigger the challenge. In fact, we expect that you answered true to just about all of these questions. That s the bad news. The good news is that help is out there.

3 Chapter 1: Archiving Basics 9 For compliance with federal and state regulations, archiving solutions store according to managed retention policies. When retention periods expire, that has not been flagged with a litigation hold for pending legal ediscovery is automatically deleted by the archiving solution. Looking at the Different Types of Solutions Three main types of archiving solutions exist: onpremise, hosted, and hybrid. In this section, we look at each. When looking at the three types of solutions mentioned above, determine how many mailboxes you wish to archive and for what length of time; Ask yourself where you want to store the archived and also what your budget can afford. Then get a quote for each. Now you can quickly compare the total costs of each solution and create a return on investment (ROI). On-premise solutions On-premise archiving solutions are installed on a dedicated server (or servers) in the same data center as the server(s). The archiving server accesses the server locally for data capture. Users access their archive using their client via the existing company network. Sensitive corporate data is kept within your organization and controlled by your employees in your facility. The archived data can be searched as many times as needed for ediscovery. On-premise archival solutions are customizable and are available from multiple vendors to support the leading applications. archiving software is typically licensed by the number of mailboxes and additional fees apply for support and maintenance. Long-term costs can be noticeably lower than hosted solutions. Hosted solutions Hosted archiving solutions are an option for customers who don t wish to install their own archiving solutions on-premise for whatever reason. For what s usually a monthly

4 10 Part I: Getting to Know Archiving Believe it or not, archiving systems have been around for a long time. In fact, they ve been around since the early days of . The first archiving solutions appeared in the mid-1990s, and their purpose was to reduce storage demand on the server. Beginning in 2002, the demand for archiving exploded A look back in the financial services industry when the Securities and Exchange Commission required that all of its members archive . Today, new generations of archiving solutions are appearing driven by the demands of legal discovery and regulatory compliance. fee based on the number of mailboxes archived and projected storage requirements, a number of mailboxes can be archived off-site at a third party facility with no on-site setup or equipment investment required. With a hosted archiving solution, you need not worry about managing the archival servers and storage. The archived data can be accessed in several different ways including via a Web-based search application provided by the hosted service provider or sometimes directly from the client such as Microsoft Outlook. This solution usually has much lower start-up costs, but service costs can be higher over the long-term. Refer to Chapter 7 for more detail. Hybrid solutions A new choice in archiving is the hybrid model. This solution allows for the capture and encryption of your organization s data before it is sent to another location for storage. The hybrid model has a couple of major advantages such as local mailbox management and the ability for end-users to search their own archives quickly, because servers are kept in-house. Potential savings in the storage costs can be realized, while moving storage off site also builds in the potential for disaster recovery into the model.

5 Reducing Storage Loads Just as nature abhors a vacuum, users seem to abhor an empty box. One problem is that users use the system as their personal file system. Rarely do users delete s, just in case they need them sometime in the future. Then there s the size of s today. Back when mailbox quotas were 10 megabytes, messages were much smaller. As attachments became more prevalent and quotas increased to compensate, boxes filled even more quickly. Now, quotas are measured in hundreds of megabytes, and still users cry for more. Users will always find ways to fill up their mailboxes. To reduce the amount of data on the application server(s), archival solutions remove and attachments using policies based on the age of the or attachment and size it is that simple. Once the is removed it can be accessed via a link to the archive or replaced with a small stub file (or shortcut) pointing to its new storage location in the archive. The and attachments in the archive can also be searched for legal discovery and compliance by persons granted that capability. Too much stubbing can slow down Microsoft Outlook so be careful. In situations where tens-of-thousands of messages are being considered for stubbing, simply moving the to the archive without stubbing is the better choice. Recovering Lost Chapter 1: Archiving Basics 11 Admit it, you ve deleted an and wished to have it back either a moment or a few days later. You can ask friends to forward you a copy of the , or you can try using an system s built-in recovery tool. If your system and your friends fail you, then archiving can help. Restoration of from the archive is a feature that all archival solutions can perform. After all, what kind of useful archive won t let you look at your stored information? Depending on the archival solution you re using, administrators search the archive and restore individual messages,

6 12 Part I: Getting to Know Archiving or end-users search their archived mailboxes themselves and restore individual messages. Knowing that the archives can recover that otherwise may never be found is a relief. When comparing archival solutions ask for a live demo so you can see for yourself how easy it is to search and browse the archive and restore individual . Helping End-Users Limitations aren t good for business. When users are limited by mailbox capacity, they re forced to spend valuable hours deleting and/or moving to offline storage files. Both activities take time, and users may accidentally delete or overwrite valuable information. Archiving helps your endusers by giving them the location to store years worth of ; that might otherwise have been deleted due to lack of space on the server. Archiving makes it easy for end-users and administrators to find old messages (either their own or others) and retrieve that information at any time. Using search tools provided by the archiving solution, you search using names, dates, and wildcards to find what you need quickly, without having to search manually through years worth of s. Well done!