WHITEPAPER: The Business Benefits of Email Archiving The Business Benefits of Email Archiving Email archiving is an essential business tool for which the benefits go far beyond the realm of the IT department. It is more than regulatory compliance - it is a strategic tool for productivity, long-term information storage, discovery, retrieval and access.
The Business Benefits of Email Archiving Contents The Business Benefits email archiving..............................................1 Backup versus archiving common misunderstanding............................... 2 Why archive?...................................................................2 Traditional approaches to email archiving..........................................3 Archiving challenges............................................................4 Archiving solutions and the hosted option.......................................... 4
The Business Benefits email archiving Every business relies on email; without it, commerce would grind to a halt. At the same time, it has become an enormous burden. In addition to the enormous amount of a company s data storage it consumes, unless it is managed properly organisations may also find that employee productivity suffers in all areas of the business. Choosing a hosted email archiving system can help reduce the administrative overhead while proving simultaneously beneficial to the business at large. Historically, companies bought archiving systems to help them to comply with regulations. While still important for many industries, such as the law, healthcare and financial services, this is now only a priority in a third of deployments, according to a 2011 Symantec.cloud survey of UK IT decision-makers (see sidebar 1 below). As we can see, other drivers predominate now: Improving employee productivity IT: People tend to cost more than hardware or software. The need to maintain and manage an internal archiving system can consume significant resource. Worse still, the absence of an archiving system can create even more work for IT as they are the sole resource for retrieving emails, for example in response to a request under the Data Protection Act. What benefits could be gained from enabling employees to find their own emails and removing the requirement for IT to manage those internal systems. What other valuable, activity could be achieved with the time saved? Other departments: As the volume of email increases, so does the amount of time individuals spend using it. Not just to send and receive but also finding old emails. We ve all experienced the pain of searching for a specific email only to find that our search returns hundreds of mails that meet the search criteria we ve entered. But what if that search time could be cut down? For example, in an organisation with 500 employees, saving each one just ten minutes a week would result in a time saving of 2.8 man years per year. Reducing capital costs Osterman Research notes that corporate email volumes will grow 68% through 2012, leading to an annual increase in storage needs of 40%. As this expansion continues, managing the storage starts to look increasingly daunting. Changing to an outsourcing model removes the need to manage archive storage and turns these capital costs into predictable operational costs driven by users rather than storage volume. Curating institutional memory Ensuring that every email that a company sends or receives is stored automatically and made searchable is a vitally important way to preserve corporate know-how and history. There is nothing to forget it s all in the archive. Sidebar one: Archiving drivers Compliance is not the main driver for archiving. In fact, taming data growth, improving email performance and giving people access to information rank higher. What are the main drivers for adopting/improving your Email Archiving process and procedures? % Managing data growth 57% Improving end-user s access to information 49% Improving mail server performance 38% Compliance with Government record retention regulations 33% Adherence to internal record management policies 22% Source: Symantec.cloud survey of IT decision-makers in the UK, Spring 2011 Note: as this question can have multiple responses the % column will not add up to 100% 1
Backup versus archiving common misunderstanding What s the difference? Backup systems are insurance against loss and usually involve technology that takes a periodic snapshot of data. That becomes part of an organisation s disaster recovery plan. Backup focuses on having a high performance technology for quick streaming, as well as low cost storage, such as tape. This approach may be useful as a means of restoring entire volumes after a crash, but it is painfully inefficient as a means of retrieving individual files. Archiving, on the other hand, has a greater focus on retrieval not just after a disaster, but at any point in time. That retrieval, instead of being focused on recovering an entire volume, is designed so that users can search for individual items (emails or attachments) easily and retrieve them on demand. In short, both these tools are needed as they fulfill different roles. Why should you care? As an end user or department manager, archiving is a granular retrieval tool that enables you and your teams to find their own data far more quickly and without taking up valuable IT resource. If you re IT then not only do you benefit from the reduced reliance on your resource but outsourcing the email archives can significantly reduce the amount of data that must be backed up and so provides the additional benefit of a shortened backup window. Why archive? An Osterman Research survey indicated that 38% of respondents prioritised deploying archiving to better manage storage; 35% for managing e-discovery; and 35% for managing regulatory compliance 1. Symantec.cloud research found similar results (see sidebar 1). Companies need archiving for a range of business needs: Regulatory compliance Many organisations must comply with industry-specific regulations, such as those enforced by the Financial Services Authority or The Law Society. Regulations impose standards for retention, data protection, and confidentiality. This requires not only having the technology in place, but also having a formal policy and written procedures in place for taking the required actions. Legal requirements Companies that don t fall under the purview of regulations, or which don t foresee legal discovery issues, may assign lower priority to archiving, but they do so at their own peril. Archiving isn t just for legal issues. For example, the Data Protection Act affects most businesses. Anyone can issue a subject access request a request for a listing of personal information and you have to comply, whatever your industry sector. Without an archiving system, IT departments have to deal with these requests by manually searching emails for any mention of the individual in question. A central, searchable archive can simplify the whole process and make it much less timeconsuming often reducing the time from hours or even days, to minutes. 1 Osterman Research, Inc. Results of a survey on 2010 messaging issues. February, 2010. 2 Osterman: The concise guide to E-Discovery, January 2010 2
E-discovery You may rely on your email records as evidence in a court case or employment tribunal and you may have to produce them as part of the discovery phase. According to Osterman 2 75% of legal case now require the submission of email. Collating emails can be very time consuming but can be significantly simplified by an archiving system. However, before a court accepts any email, it must comply with standards and security safeguards and a coherent and rigidly followed retention policy. It can be hard to meet these requirements by just storing email on your email server. Being able to search for every relevant email and produce irrefutable evidence could reduce your legal fees and may even mean the difference between winning and losing in court. Employment disputes - From a human resources perspective, retaining archives will help protect the organisation against potential contract or employment disputes. In cases where a dismissal may appear necessary, an accurate audit trail and reliable evidence from emails may be essential to reduce the risk of facing an Employment Tribunal. Unfair dismissal claims can be costly, both in terms of fines and in time spent defending the company s decisions. Employee productivity - The most compelling reason for any company to deploy a formal email archiving system is based on employee productivity. Staff members routinely save emails, often building up huge files on their desktops. Radicati Group estimates that the typical corporate user sends and receives 110 messages every day 3. When someone needs to find a particular email or attachment, it may take a considerable amount of time to locate it, especially if the email in question is several months old - it means searching through literally thousands of messages. An archiving system can do the same search in seconds, giving staff ready access to vital information right when they need it most. Reduced risk of data loss - Further, without a proper archiving system, security may be compromised because end-users may resort to off-loading emails to external data, USB memory sticks or optical disks on an ad hoc basis, quickly bringing the organisation out of compliance and causing additional search and retrieval problems. Increased business resilience - Email archiving improves an organisation s ability to cope with interruptions and problems. It provides a belt and braces quasi-backup of important email data. It also protects against interruptions caused by personnel changes. For example, employees don t always leave their jobs in an orderly fashion. If someone leaves at short notice, it may be impossible to get access to vital emails. A centralised archive also protects against the very real possibility that the departure of an employee could result in the loss of valuable data. It also ensures continuity in case someone is unexpectedly ill or absent for other reasons (subject to local legislation). Traditional approaches to email archiving Because of the limitations and expense of traditional email archiving systems, it is often assigned lower priority within an organisation, especially if there are pressing budget issues. Osterman Research indicates 4 that only 39% of respondents have deployed an email archiving system. Symantec.cloud s research found similar results (45%). 3 The Radicati Group, Email statistics report, 2010. 4 Osterman Research, Inc. Results of a survey on 2010 messaging issues. February, 2010. 3
One of the most potentially damaging practices is informal archiving. Without a formal archiving system in place, individual employees face a dilemma. The IT Department will often have a quota to limit how much storage each individual can use for emails, but the unfortunate result of that policy is that individual users will simply rely on creating their own archives through inefficient Personal Storage Table (PST) files. Besides the fact that these local archives are notoriously difficult and time-consuming to search through, this practice also carries a high risk of data loss and can make discovery virtually impossible. Sidebar two: How users access old emails Less than half of companies give their users straightforward access to archived emails. How do users access their historic emails? % Through tool within their email application linked to archive store 40% Via local emails stored on their local PC 24% Request to IT 20% No access is provided 7% They use an additional tool on their desktop 4% Not sure 5% Source: Symantec.cloud survey of IT decision-makers in the UK, Spring 2011 Archiving challenges for the user Aside from the amount of storage that they use, one of the most obvious challenges arising from reliance on individual PST files is visibility. Earlier in this paper we discussed institutional memory and the issues that can arise from unexpected departure of employees. Individual PST files magnify the difficulties in both these areas, not to mention the difficulties in searching for specific emails or ranges of emails on a particular subject. A formal archiving system significantly improves capabilities on all these fronts centralising knowledge, improving visibility and reducing the time and effort required to retrieve emails that meet specific criteria. But is that the whole story? On-premise archiving, besides having an obvious conflict with best practices as part of disaster recovery strategies, carries additional challenges. Such solutions call for organisations to pay attention to scalability and continuity issues. If the on-premise archive fails, is there a continuity plan or redundancies built in? These redundancies are essential, but add cost to the plan. The scalability issue also requires the organisation to build in a certain level of over-provisioning, and periodic additional capital expense. Archiving solutions and the hosted option Choices range from no archiving at all, to informal archiving (PST files on individual desktops), on premise archiving (requiring capital expense), or hosted archiving (which can be less costly, more efficient, and easily searchable). While many companies are beginning to deploy archiving systems, the majority make do with ad-hoc or non-existent systems. They may be taking a risk and missing an opportunity. Enterprise Vault.cloud is a secure hosted system that can help to address all requirements, including e-discovery, compliance, business continuity, storage management, and human resources issues. Symantec s secure cloud is immediately scalable and able to accommodate your growth and volume transparently and as a result, eliminates the need to lay out additional capital expenditures for frequent hardware upgrades and additions. At the same time, that growth is well-managed, so no matter how large your storage becomes, search and retrieval is always fast and accurate. 4
Because Enterprise Vault.cloud stores data in multiple, geographically-redundant data centres, it fits well with continuity and disaster recovery strategies. Security and authorisation controls are built in, allowing global searches for authorised administrators, while offering flexible but controlled access to other end users. Security is always a concern, especially in an industry that falls under certain government regulations. Enterprise Vault.cloud encrypts email in transit, then stores it in a secure, state-of-the-art data centre. Compliance is further assured with a full audit trail. Enterprise Vault.cloud offers significant advantages over an on premise system in terms of expense, set-up time and usability and reinforces security, compliance, searchability and usability. 4
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About Symantec.cloud More than 31,000 organisations ranging from small businesses to the Fortune 500 across 100 countries use Symantec.cloud s MessageLabs services to administer, monitor and protect their information resources more effectively. Organisations can choose from 14 pre-integrated applications to help secure and manage their business even as new technologies and devices are introduced and traditional boundaries of the workplace disappear. Services are delivered on a highly scalable, reliable and energy-efficient global infrastructure built on 14 data centers around the globe. A division within Symantec Corporation, Symantec.cloud offers customers the ability to work more productively in a connected world. For specific country offices and contact numbers, please visit our website: www.symanteccloud.com World Headquarters MessageLabs 1270 Lansdowne Court Gloucester Business Park Gloucester, GL3 4AB United Kingdom +44 (0) 1452 627 627 Copyright 2011 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec and the Symantec Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 2/2011 21167338