Email Archiving Technology Trends May 2006. Report #639 Ferris Research Analyzer Information Service Ferris Research, Inc. 408 Columbus Ave., Suite 1 San Francisco, Calif. 94133, USA Phone: +1 (415) 986-1414 Fax: +1 (415) 986-5994 www.ferris.com
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Table of Contents Email Archiving Technology Trends...4 Executive Summary...4 Email Archiving Market, 2006-2010...4 Key Trends and Observations...5 Emergence of the Hybrid Option...5 Self-Service Tools...5 Continuous Data Protection...6 Transaction Logging Replaces Journaling for Archiving...6 Automated Content Analysis...7 Increasing Use of Encryption...7 Greater Use of Offline Archives...8 Conclusions...8 For More Information...8 Visit us at www.ferris.com for market intelligence on messaging and collaboration technologies. 3
Email Archiving Technology Trends Executive Summary On March 22, 2006, Ferris Research presented a webinar titled Key Email Archiving Trends. Ferris would like to thank EEMA, Mimosa Systems, Wolcott Group, and Zantaz for sponsoring the event. This follow-up report details the present state of the archiving market and discusses the trends and available options in current archiving technologies and approaches. Key findings include: Hybrid archiving solutions that combine on-site and off-site hosted services offer flexible deployment options. Self-service tools are enabling employees to find and restore messages and maintain mailbox storage limits. Continuous backup provides more thorough and rapid recovery of archived data. Transaction logging is replacing journaling for electronic discovery (ediscovery) and compliance. Automated content analysis helps users and email managers classify and manage emails more consistently. Increasing use of encryption by individual employees may hamper ediscovery of some messages. Accessing offline archives is a key issue for mobile users. Email Archiving Market, 2006-2010 The email archiving market is still relatively new, with early adoption typically limited to the largest organizations, such as major financial institutions, in the United States and Europe. The worldwide market size is estimated at $1 billion. While the need to reduce email storage size drove early implementations, regulatory compliance soon became another strong factor in adoption. Today operational efficiency has re-emerged as the primary motivation, followed by compliance and new secondary drivers including productivity, fault tolerance, and business continuity. 4 Visit us at www.ferris.com for market intelligence on messaging and collaboration technologies.
Email archiving represents the most difficult component of a comprehensive content management solution to implement and manage. Based on this situation, content management and compliance solutions will converge in two waves. First, early adopters will implement separate point solutions for each, followed by a move to unified content management products that will likely emerge within the next three to five years. Key Trends and Observations Currently, seven technology and administrative trends are under way in the email archiving market. These will not only significantly change the nature of archival solutions but also greatly improve the options available to IT administrators and end users. Emergence of the Hybrid Option Organizations today are four times more likely to implement on-site archiving systems than to employ off-site hosted ones. The popularity of the on-site approach is driven by benefits such as the ability to do mailbox management, improved IT efficiency, storage optimization, stability, and performance. However, many organizations are also recognizing there are benefits to be had from an off-site hosted solution. These benefits include scalability, security, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) for shared infrastructure. For some, the ideal approach is a mixture of on-site and off-site. With this hybrid approach, some of the archival components are hosted and some are kept at the customer s location. The benefits of combining an off-site and on-site archiving solution include more flexible deployments, better provisioning for unique requirements and topologies, and full redundancy for continuity of service. A minimally hosted solution might involve placing just the document storage component off-site, with the archive engine, archive manager, and database server remaining on premise. This option enables smooth extraction of information on-site and controlled access to the archives. It also reduces the costs of managing long-term storage. At the other end of the scale, a hybrid arrangement that would be biased toward hosted components might involve moving all components except the archive engine to a service provider s data center. Messages are captured on-site and transferred to the service provider for archiving. Self-Service Tools Three tasks commonly frustrate end users: finding and restoring individual messages, staying within their mailbox storage limits, and if they are unable to stay within these limits, managing the resulting.pst files. End users are demanding self-service functionality to perform these tasks quickly and easily without the assistance of IT or the help desk. Visit us at www.ferris.com for market intelligence on messaging and collaboration technologies. 5
Most tools on the market enable end users to migrate their own.pst files and attachments into the archive. This significantly reduces the user s mailbox storage requirements but does not enable users to restore lost, unarchived messages without having IT go through a time-consuming procedure to restore an individual mailbox from tape backups. Users need the ability to find lost messages and restore them independently. They also need the ability to migrate their personal archives into a central repository where automated content analysis will be performed. Continuous Data Protection Traditionally, message store recovery after a failure has been slow. This is primarily because the usual method is to do a bulk restore of the message store. It also frequently results in data loss. Today, however, recovery can and should be instantaneous in order to ensure business continuity. Many current email archival solutions offer continuous backup for more thorough and rapid recovery. Key differentiators between the solutions on the market include performance, manageability, and cost, as well as whether or not they use agents on the messaging server that may create bottlenecks and additional points of failure. Transaction Logging Replaces Journaling for Archiving Messaging is a highly transactional and constantly changing environment. Capturing email for legal discovery under these conditions requires a stable environment that preserves all email in a tamper-proof state. One solution is journaling, in which the file system keeps a running journal of the data changes it needs to record so that, in the event of a failure, recovery can be done by simply rereading the journal and replaying the changes logged. The downside of journaling is that it effectively doubles the amount of mail handled by the message store. Hence, a heavy reliance on journaling may require IT to reposition mailboxes and add more hardware. Also, journaling is not a complete solution because edits, deletes, or movements of message items are not captured and these capabilities are integral to legal discovery. Archiving software, which uses transaction logging rather than journaling, can provide these capabilities. It can also help to shrink the message store, typically by 50% to 90%, due to the offloading of attachments and the elimination of duplicate copies of messages. Transaction logging is an alternative interface to journaling for data capture. The benefits of transaction logging will likely motivate other email and archival software vendors to introduce enhanced transaction logging functionality as well. This will result in a new generation of products integrating both recovery and archiving. 6 Visit us at www.ferris.com for market intelligence on messaging and collaboration technologies.
Automated Content Analysis Organizations are primarily using two archiving policies. The first is to sweep all messaging content into the archive. The second is to set a default limit on active storage and let users decide what email should be retained beyond that constraint. Deciding what to keep, what to cull, and who should make the decision is often a difficult process. Letting the users make archival decisions on a per-message basis creates an ad hoc, manual process that results in inconsistencies and loss of data. It is inconsistent because some users can choose to delete one type of email while other users may opt to archive it. It results in data loss because email that should be archived often is not. Plus, the organization is still liable to produce emails in a lawsuit, and courts have shown little patience with companies that have very short retention cycles. Automated content analysis, a feature in some email archiving packages, makes it easier for email managers to bridge this gap by providing a customizable rules-based tool for classifying and tagging different types of content. This functionality is especially beneficial in process-driven organizations such as law firms. Automating content analysis as part of an overall content control strategy also provides the consistency organizations need while permitting the convenience users want. The state of automated content analysis is still rather crude today, focusing mainly on fixed pattern recognition such as social security numbers or dollar amounts. However, there are content control products poised for release that incorporate new research into advanced context within content search techniques. Increasing focus on corporate governance is driving organizations to create various content categories to better cope with regulatory compliance and archive management. Typically, organizations will have three to five categories of content with differing lengths of time each must be stored. For example, audit papers in the financial industry must be stored for seven years while email not deemed important enough to be archived e.g., There s birthday cake in the break room is discarded in 30 days. Seven years is the time period most often stipulated for long-term storage. Increasing Use of Encryption Organizations and individual employees are slowly adopting the use of encryption to protect themselves against discovery and to protect sensitive and proprietary information. While the number of encrypted messages in archives is increasing, the ability to search on them is hampered by the fact that encrypted messages cannot be indexed. Archiving solutions will need to provide the ability to index these messages as well as decrypt, display, and re-encrypt them based on user access rights. Visit us at www.ferris.com for market intelligence on messaging and collaboration technologies. 7
Greater Use of Offline Archives For highly mobile users, the ability to access email archives offline, while traveling, is extremely valuable. Typically, a user may want to take along the last three months of emails. The addition of an offline email archive may increase laptop storage needs, and dictate the addition of external storage or increased internal hard drive capacity. IT departments should evaluate users storage requirements in order to provide the optimal experience for them while on the road. Conclusions Archiving solutions are still in the early stage of adoption. However, the need for them is clearly increasing. As adoption rises, the following technology trends are emerging: Organizations are adopting hybrid approaches that provide a combination of on-site and off-site hosted archival products and services. Purely hosted solutions will also continue to gain market share. End users prefer self-service tools and functionality, allowing them to recover lost messages as needed. Organizations should develop three to five content categories to determine the types of messages to be deleted or stored and how long each category remains in storage. Organizations need to decide what to keep and what to delete, and implement those policies as part of a comprehensive content control strategy. For More Information The presentation slides and an audio recording of the live webinar on which this report is based are available for download to subscribers to our Analyzer Information Service at www.ferris.com. They are made available for purchase by nonsubscribers as well. Author: Nancy Cox Editor: Sue Hildreth The Key Email Archiving Trends webinar was moderated by Ferris analyst David Via, and featured presenters from two leading email archiving vendors. Ferris Research would like to thank: Bob Spurzem, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Mimosa Systems, Inc. Michael Gaines, Director, EAS Product Strategy, Zantaz, Inc. 8 Visit us at www.ferris.com for market intelligence on messaging and collaboration technologies.
Ferris Research Ferris Research is a market research firm specializing in messaging and collaborative technologies. We provide business, market, and technical intelligence to vendors and corporate IT managers worldwide with analysts located in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. To help clients track the technology and spot important developments, Ferris publishes reports, white papers, bulletins, and a news wire; organizes conferences and surveys; and provides customized consulting. In business since 1991, we enjoy an international reputation as the leading firm in our field, and have by far the largest and most experienced research team covering messaging and collaboration. Ferris Research is located at 408 Columbus Ave., Suite 1, San Francisco, Calif. 94133, USA. For more information, visit www.ferris.com or call +1 (415) 986-1414. Free News Service Ferris Research publishes a free daily news service. It provides comprehensive coverage of the messaging and collaboration field, and is a great way to keep current. Topics include spam, email, email retention/archiving, mobile messaging devices, consumer messaging services, Web conferencing, email encryption, email migrations and upgrades, regulations compliance, instant messaging, ISP messaging, and team workspaces. The news is distributed daily. To register, go to www.ferris.com/forms/newsletter_signup.php. In addition, you will receive one or two emails every month announcing new Ferris reports or conferences. To opt out and suppress further email from Ferris Research, click on the opt-out button at the end of each news mailing.