Intelligent Archiving and Storage for Compliance and Knowledge Mining

E-mail is no longer just an informal, transient messaging mechanism—it’s a vital part of an organization’s infrastructure. But while the dynamic flow of e-mail is now recognized as the lifeblood of an enterprise, the value of its content is often overlooked. The items held in mailboxes and shared folders, for example, are a vital information asset both as a major part of each individual’s knowledge base, and as a significant intellectual property asset of the organization as a whole. This means that the problem of managing e-mail is not just one of keeping it moving and preventing it from clogging up frontline storage. Now it’s also about protecting and fully utilizing the contents of e-mail—a “knowledge management” problem in the literal sense.

Information Evaporation

Most organizations today have typically done little or nothing in the way of an information retention policy for e-mail. They tend to concentrate primarily on the practical issue of controlling storage growth by limiting mailbox sizes and applying storage quotas, with little thought being given to preserving the content. As users hit their quota limit enforced by the administrators, they are automatically prevented from sending or even receiving e-mail, which immediately puts them under pressure to do housekeeping with little or no direction as to what should be retained and how. As a result, important items tend to be deleted, moved to private stores or forwarded to external mail systems. Unfortunately, information moved out of central systems is information lost. This situation is exacerbated by regular staff turnaround; when people leave the organization, privately stored information goes with them. Administrators also jump on the chance to delete past employee mailboxes rather than leaving them to consume storage. The overall effect is that important and relevant information is continuously evaporating out of the organization.

A Further Issue

The total body of unstructured information in the organization is itself an information asset, ready to be explored and exploited. It is possible to envisage advanced tools in this space that will take advantage of the fact that not only is there a massive amount of raw information stored within the organization, but also the metadata defining how that information was routed or shared is also recorded. If that data is fully interpreted and exploited then there are very exciting opportunities for using it to re-engineer businesses and maximize the effectiveness of their employees. Needless to say, if the body of information is continuously reduced through evaporation, or if it is distributed in thousands of local and personal stores, then it is not in a position to be exploited.

Legal Discovery

Given the growing number of corporate lawsuits and increased issuance of government subpoenas, implementing e-mail retention polices has become a must-do. You don’t have to be a corporate giant under suspicion to have your e-mail requested as part of legal discovery in a lawsuit or inquiry. Thanks to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and many similar state rulings, corporate e-mail is recognized as a discoverable form of electronic information, which must be produced on demand if requested. The burden is often on your legal counsel to produce the requested data; the problem is, producing e-mail for electronic discovery is an extremely expensive and labor-intensive task. Without the proper tools, locating and sifting through enormous volumes of e-mail and attachments can prolong legal defense work and possibly cripple your ability to respond. As many enterprises have learned, it’s better to be prepared than be surprised during the discovery process.

Regulatory Compliance

Apart from its use as a knowledge store, there is another more pragmatic and often mandatory reason to manage unstructured information properly, and that is the law. In many sectors, especially finance, pharmaceuticals and government, there are already legal mandates to retain some or all of information contained in e-mail. Surprisingly, many organizations simply apply general backup principles to their e-mail hoping they will never have to retrieve the content. In today’s business climate, with increasing scrutiny from regulatory bodies that demand strict e-mail retention policies, the most effective and pragmatic approach is to implement intelligent e-mail archiving and WORM technologies. As a result there is an immediate opportunity to harness information mining and searching technology to implement audit and supervisory functions. Even the legal implications of deleting the e-mail, which in essence is a legal record, need to be considered. If not managed properly, the risk of severe penalties now seems almost inescapable wherever litigation can apply.

Content Archiving with KVS Enterprise Vault

Content archiving software, including e-mail archiving, should be designed for alleviating the pains, pressures and risk companies feel from the explosive growth of information in messaging and collaborative systems. From legal and regulatory compliance and risk mitigation to infrastructure and migration challenges, good archiving software should bring industrial strength to e-mail and collaboration systems by protecting and preventing a company’s intellectual capital from becoming lost or dormant. KVS developed its flagship product, Enterprise Vault, precisely to meet these goals.

Sony, one of the hundreds of KVS customers, attests to the importance and relevancy of Enterprise Vault. “Most corporate e-mail systems are the backbone for sharing information for many companies. If you don’t apply some sort of e-mail storage, archive, retrieval and lifecycle management system, you need more and more exchange servers to cope with the PST files. As the amount of e-mail flying between them increases, the amount of data increases as does the time and cost involved in back up and restore,” said Max Griffiths, a Sony UK Ltd Network and Server Team Leader. “With Enterprise Vault, we are able to take the old, infrequently used e-mail out of the system and securely store it. In doing so, we can keep our Exchange system lean and get good speed for our users. Without it, our day-to-day database would just get bigger and slower.”

Sony also wanted to find a full solution that would provide lifecycle management of e-mails and access to older e-mails. “We wanted a system that would remove the risks associated with PST storage, as well as improve legal compliance through e-mail lifecycle management,” Griffiths adds. “A lot of the products we looked at were not 100% stable. Enterprise Vault is one of the few robust, comprehensive e-mail management systems on the market.”

Protecting Information with Sony Optical

While RAID is the most commonly used storage technology, its rewriteable characteristics fall short of meeting the guidelines of regulatory markets. The addition of an Optical Library System provides companies with the means to create a regulatory compliant high-performance storage solution. Because optical drives support both WORM and rewriteable media, optical libraries can store information required to meet legal and regulatory guidelines on WORM media, while the rewriteable media provides economical storage load balancing with the RAID. And because of optical’s high-performance seek times and transfer rates, users may not distinguish if they are retrieving information from an optical drive or RAID. This performance advantage, combined with the disk caching and prefetch features of optical library management software, can effectively make the media swap times associated with optical libraries virtually transparent to the users.

The City of Oceanside— A Case Study in E-Mail Retention

The City of Oceanside, CA, recognizes the value and importance of the content being generated and received via government e-mail. Oceanside policy states that all e-mails associated with the conduct of the City are considered public records and must be retained at a minimum for two years. The preserved e-mail must also be easily accessible for both City management and fulfillment of public records requests as similarly defined by Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) standards. While this aggressive retention policy was initiated to protect and better serve citizen interest, the City e-mail system became flooded with critical public information, creating numerous issues for Oceanside’s existing Microsoft Exchange environment:

• City e-mail records were being lost or deleted by human error;;

• Backups failed to adequately support recovery requests;;

• Lack of search functionality made retrieving City e-mail difficult.

To solve these problems, the City of Oceanside implemented Enterprise Vault e-mail content archiving from KVS Inc. to address recovering lost e-mail and assured compliance to public records requests and City policy.

“Enterprise Vault dramatically simplifies our e-mail management and recovery process,” said Michael Sherwood, CIO of the City of Oceanside. “The amount of time saved by restoring e-mail through Enterprise Vault vs. backup is immense. What used to take us hours now takes five minutes.”

Managing an Exchange environment of 1200 users, Oceanside’s IT department must regularly process public records requests for City e-mail as well as additional requests to restore City e-mail from backup. With Enterprise Vault in place, Oceanside has reduced the search and retrieval time of its e-mail requests by 95%.

Enterprise Vault Mailbox Archiving streamlined Oceanside’s environment by eliminating any need for mailbox quotas or message size restrictions, and its Journaling feature automatically captures and saves a copy of every message passing through the Exchange server. Lost or accidentally deleted e-mail is a thing of the past because users can search and retrieve their archived e-mail directly from Outlook, and the City can instantly search and fulfill all public records requests via a centrally accessible archive of all City e-mail.

“On the legal side, Enterprise Vault enables us to recover not only messages but also attached documents via the keyword search feature. It allows us to search text within an attachment and that’s another great time saving feature,” said Sherwood.

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KVS Inc. and Sony Electronics offer industry-leading products and technologies to help businesses address the challenges highlighted in this article:

• An intelligent and efficient e-mail and content archiving product;;

• Compliance Accelerator to ensure regulatory compliance, including supervisory functions;;

• Discovery Accelerator to provide corporations with a cost-effective and efficient way to retain, manage, and search your e-mail and attachments;;

• Multifunction Optical drives with compliant WORM (Write Once Read Many) and high performance rewriteable storage technology.;

To find out more about Enterprise Vault from KVS please visit us at KVS.You may also contact us via e-mail at info@kvsinc.com, or by phone at +1 877-358-2858.

For more information visit Sony's optical products, or email mike.hall@am.sony.com.

Win a chance to receive a free, personalized ROI study from KVS and find out how Enterprise Vault can save you money while optimizing your Microsoft Exchange Environment. Simply e-mail info@kvsinc.com with the subject line “I want to win a free ROI study” and you will be contacted with the details of this exciting opportunity.