WHITEPAPER Cloud, On-premise or Hybrid? Deciding Factors for Choosing your next Data Archiving Solution
Cloud, On-premise or Hybrid Deciding factors for choosing your next data archive solution Executive summary Companies buy email archiving systems to reduce the cost of email storage, to comply with regulations and to give staff better access to business information stored in email archives and a way to make e-discovery more efficient. Historically, archiving solutions such as Symantec Enterprise Vault required a significant investment in on-premise hardware, software and maintenance. However, the emergence of cloud-based archiving systems, such as Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud, has given companies an alternative. This white paper looks at what drives the need for email archiving, evaluates different approaches and discusses some of the questions companies should ask when they consider email archiving.
The rising tide of data Data volumes are roughly doubling every year 1. A mid-size organisation may have 4-10 terabytes of historical email data and it s not unusual for a 10,000-person organisation to have over 35TB of local email storage 2. The rate of growth will increase as email volumes increase and attachments get bigger. Companies are waking up to the value of institutional memory and business intelligence available in their email archives. In this context, restricting their users and capping email storage seems counter-productive in the long run. In fact, smart businesses are looking to their email archive as a protection against legal disputes, a source of business intelligence and a way to build competitive advantage. Email is at the heart of business. It is the medium for teamwork, discussions, negotiations, agreements and shared information. Business users spend about a fifth of their time (19 percent or one hour and 17 minutes per day) sending and receiving emails 3. They deal with an average of 108 business email messages a day 4. Capturing that information and making it available in a consistent way is essential. Data management is everybody s problem Organisations also turn to email archiving to meet regulatory requirements. For example, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 affects all public authorities and FSA regulations require 5 all financial institutions to store all business emails for up to six years and some emails indefinitely. But sector-specific mandates are not the end of the story. In the UK, some regulations could affect virtually every business, including the Data Protection Act 1998. Anyone has the right to issue a subject access request for information about them. It s a task that can keep IT departments busy for days at a time. Also, employers are vulnerable to employment tribunals and all businesses may be involved in litigation or subject to an audit. In all three cases, access to comprehensive, well-organised email archives can reduce costs and risks. 1 http://www.enterprisevault.com/#/introduction 2 Gartner: Creating a Safe and Sane Email Retention Program 3 Business email use: http://www.radicati.com/?p=4579 4 Business email use: http://www.radicati.com/?p=4579 5 https://www.watsonhall.com/resources/downloads/paper-uk-data-retention-requirements.pdf 3
Managing the cost of storage Fast secondary storage of the sort required by email systems can be expensive and so companies are constantly looking for ways to reduce this cost. In the short term, mailbox quotas and attachment limits may provide a stop gap. However, paying employees to spend their time reviewing and deleting their email to stay under quota is not cost-effective. It also generates extra work for the IT department as they deal with requests for extra storage or the consequences of badly-managed personal email archives in local PST files. When faced with these challenges - storage demands, regulation and business needs - companies naturally look towards email archiving as the solution to their problems. Email archiving in its most basic form moves old emails and especially old attachments into cheaper storage systems while still providing ready access for end users. Email archiving can be enhanced with controlled retention categorisation and full content searching to help support various backend compliance and legal requirements. Archiving choices Gartner expects to see the storage management and archiving market grow at an annual rate of 17.5% through 2015 6. There are several strategies open to companies: Do nothing. In a recent survey of organisations messaging practices, leading analyst, Osterman Research found 7 that only 39% of respondents had deployed an email archiving system. Symantec.cloud research found similar results (45%). In some ways, this is a decision not to make a decision. Instead of a planned solution, these organisations rely on ad-hoc, expensive, inefficient methods of storing, finding and retrieving old emails. For example, it took a request to the IT department to retrieve old emails in 20% of surveyed companies 8 and another 24% just left them to access emails stored on their local PC. Opting to add storage and increase mailbox quotas buys time, but does nothing to address the mounting costs and complexity. Even if an organisation is not subject to formal regulations, retaining emails stored in PSTs is unwieldy and difficult to manage. 6 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving Published: 6 December 2011 7 Osterman Research, Inc. Results of a survey on 2010 messaging issues. February, 2010. 8 Source: Symantec.cloud survey of IT decision-makers in the UK, Spring 2011 4
Rely on your email backup. There is a common misconception that backup and archiving performs the same function. Backups are primarily a form of insurance that help you recover from a serious problem such as a hardware failure or natural disaster. The majority of backup software does not apply archiving policies, de-duplicate attachments, ensure regulatory compliance or make it easy to retrieve individual emails. Even where it is applied, data stored in an offsite backup is harder to search, for example for e-discovery purposes, than data stored in a dedicated archive system. Use archiving features built into Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Microsoft s latest email server software has a number of features that can take advantage of cheaper storage for email archives and replicate email databases to provide additional resilience. This can help solve the storage problems and remove the shadow of mailbox quotas. This may be enough for some companies but it has some drawbacks. There is limited support for indexing to support companywide email search and e-discovery. In addition, there is no de-duplication of attachments so it does not make optimal use of the storage available to it. Switch to a cloud-based email system. Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 and hosted Exchange systems offer users generous email quotas which helps companies solve (or at least postpone) the storage issue. They also have the benefit of a cloud business model. Instead of upfront capital costs, you pay a monthly fee per-user. However, they do not offer the infinite inbox available with a fully-fledged archiving system nor do they have the same level of policy enforcement or (without additional expense) company-wide e-discovery tools. In fact, many companies use cloud email systems AND a hosted email archiving tool. Install an on-premise archiving system. Historically, companies who needed a fully-fledged archiving capability installed software such as Symantec Enterprise Vault running on servers and storage hardware in their own datacentre. Capturing all incoming, internal and outgoing emails, it de-duplicates attachments to cut storage requirements and it uses a technique called stubbing that replaces original email with a smaller stub that links to the archived message. Together, this is an ideal solution to the storage issue. In addition, it can apply company policies consistently. It gives users access to their own email archive within Microsoft Outlook and it gives authorised users access to the company s archive as a whole for e-discovery purposes. Besides email, it can also archive other company data such as SharePoint sites and shared files. However, it requires a significant upfront investment and on-going maintenance by specialist IT staff (although it is becoming more accepted to have a third-party manage your onsite Enterprise Vault if required). 5
Deploy a cloud-hosted archiving system. According to Gartner, hosted email archiving accounts for 36.2% of new email archiving deployments while onpremise deployments account for 63.8% 9 so a cloud-based solution is gaining market acceptance. Instead of using on-premise hardware and software, this approach swaps upfront capital costs for on-going operational expenditure. It allows companies to outsource ownership and management of the system reducing the IT department s workload. Solutions such as Symantec s Enterprise Vault.cloud provide unlimited email storage and retention and rapid search across the entire archive, which is an important help for e-discovery. However, cloud-based archiving also has drawbacks. Some companies are still reluctant to see emails or other information leave their physical control and there can be extra costs and work required to upload or move large archives to and from the cloud. A further benefit of cloud-based archiving is apparent in a disaster-recovery scenario where the primary email service is unavailable. In this case, employees may be able to continue using a cloud-hosted archive. The Hybrid approach. This approach builds on the best features of the previous two options. Hybrid solutions can manage email locally before it moves to the cloud for long-term retention or be deployed to achieve a blend of functionality. For example, an organisation may keep email archiving on site due to complexity, but push journaling into the cloud and use less local storage. Email remains accessible and can be returned to local storage for legal discovery if required. The main advantage of the hybrid approach is that it provides the performance of local email archiving while using cloud storage to reduce overall storage.. The disadvantages of this approach can include greater costs, greater complexity and the normal security and recovery issues that are typical of cloud-based systems. How to make the right decision for your business To get the full benefits of email archiving, you need a dedicated system that is either cloud-hosted or on-premise. Choosing to do nothing, relying on backups or your email server are sub-optimal strategies. So, how do you choose between cloud and onpremise? Every company has a unique mix of requirements and so what is right for one company may not work for another. Here are a few questions that will help you think through the issues for your own company: 9 Gartner, Outsourcing E-Mail Archiving: 2Q11 Market Update Published: 20 May 2011 6
Complexity. How complex is your IT environment? For example, do you have multiple email systems and data centres? Generally, large complex environments map onto onsite archiving solutions. Functionality. What do you need the system to do? Is the main driver regulation, storage size or business information? Does your new system have to integrate with any existing systems or business processes? How important is it to give users easy access to their own archive? Is e-discovery a critical business issue? There are differences in functionality between cloud and on-premise systems and understanding your requirements is an important step to finding the right answer. Size of the organisation. For smaller organisations the capital cost of an onpremise solution may be uneconomic compared to a much lower on-going per user fee. However, for larger organisations there may be a tipping point where it is actually cheaper, on a per-user basis, to do archiving in-house. Data volumes. If you already have a large archive, it can be expensive to upload it to a cloud provider or, once uploaded, to switch it to another system down the line. Applicable regulations. Some companies have concerns about storing their email data with third parties and others with data sovereignty, meaning whether their data is stored in the UK, the EU or elsewhere. These concerns can argue in favour of an on-premise solution. IT skills and resources. A big advantage with cloud archiving is that it reduces the need for in-house experts to manage an archiving system. This can result in reduced costs and lower staffing requirements. At the same time, it can be helpful to get expert help to manage the migration to cloud-hosted systems. Price sensitivity. Nobody has an unlimited budget but some companies may find it easier to get capital projects signed off (implying an on-premise system) and others may prefer operational costs (implying a cloud solution). Cloudbased systems have the lowest upfront costs. 7
Cloud is changing the archiving landscape We recommend that you use these questions to think through the issues. It is also useful to develop a realistic scenario about what you need to store and how you will use the archive. Understand the direct costs of doing so, whether it is hardware and software licences for an on-premise solution or per-user fees for a cloud service. Also estimate the indirect costs, such as IT department time, and indirect benefits, such as savings, such as capping future storage growth. Make sure you understand the cost of importing data, managing an e-discovery process and extracting your data if you want to change providers in future. In navigating these decision points, an expert partner can help. For example, they can help you forecast the size of your archive and the costs of switching to a cloud or onpremise solution. When it comes to actually implementing your strategy, consulting partners can get the job done without imposing an extra burden on your IT department and eliminate unnecessary costs. Further reading Symantec Enterprise Vault Enterprise Vault.cloud Your backup is not an archive Email Archiving UK law, regulations and implications for business 8
About bluesource Symantec s leading pure play expert in Archiving & ediscovery, bluesource is an officially recognised Technical Support Provider, Enterprise Vault Master Specialist and Symantec Platinum Partner. bluesource is also a Symantec.cloud Certified Partner, the highest tier of accreditation for Symantec s industry leading Software-as-a-Service archiving, messaging and web security portfolio. The company has been deploying Enterprise Vault in complex, multi-tiered enterprise environments for over 10 years, integrating Symantec s technology for clients that demand unparalleled quality and expertise from their IT partners. With more Symantec qualified Enterprise Vault engineers than any other company in EMEA, bluesource is relied upon by a range of organisations and leading Systems Integrators as the go-to resource for all their Archiving and ediscovery needs. bluesource also provides hosting, management and support for on-premise and hybrid archiving solutions, combining the best-of-breed functionality found in Symantec Enterprise Vault, Enterprise Vault.cloud, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365.