Facilitate Email Records Management via Backup and Archiving

As enterprises struggle to manage their ever-growing stores of email and other unstructured data, many are finding their backup and recovery process severely strained and inadequate. It is becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming to protect and manage volumes of data across multiple storage tiers. Additionally, enterprises in a number of industries now must comply with laws and regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and SEC Rule 17a-4, that require the secure retention, supervision and availability of email and other business records, which traditional backup and recovery systems are not designed to facilitate. Therefore, IT and backup administrators should consider combining advanced data protection methods for faster backup and recovery with archiving technologies to create a more effective data management strategy that will address their short- and long-term needs. Long-term planning considers the software, hardware and technical resources needed to meet not only recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO) required by business units, but also new challenges such as legal discovery and compliance.

It is not uncommon for an enterprise today to support thousands of desktops and hundreds of servers hosting email systems and a variety of enterprise applications. Not long ago, applications, systems and files were largely centralized and manageable. Today, both end-user expectations and the number of enterprise applications have increased, pacing the exponential growth of data. With this growth, enterprise data has spread across remote sites and data centers, making rapid recovery and protection more difficult.

Data protection methods have evolved to help enterprises manage this situation. Disk-based backup and solutions for both desktops and remote site protection have existed for some time. More recent methods of data protection, such as synthetic backups and snapshots, have emerged to help address backup and recovery needs. Yet, despite these new methods for data protection and the decreasing cost of disk storage, many backup administrators continue to rely on traditional methods and, consequently, struggle not just to protect data, but also to provide rapid and granular recovery of valuable data that has been lost or corrupted.

The combination of new backup and recovery technologies with archiving enhances beyond traditional backup and recovery or archiving alone.

Ever-Growing Data Stores

The recent growth in unstructured data and the increasing reliance on email to communicate and exchange documents has dramatically increased the stress of data protection and management. Many companies, in fact, now consider email mission-critical. Recent studies suggest that email storage now contains as much as 75% of a company's intellectual property.

So how do organizations protect their growing email data backed up nightly when email is expected to be available 24/7? What if a legal challenge, such as a lawsuit or subpoena, requires IT to find thousands of files and emails related to last quarter's earnings? With little extra time to maintain backup windows, IT administrators are facing a significant challenge to meet stringent business requirements. To make matters worse, amidst this exponential data growth and increasing user demands for data recoverability, IT budgets remain largely flat.

The challenge for IT is to develop a system that enables easier management of ever-growing data stores while simultaneously reducing the cost of doing so. Combining software-based backup tools for advanced data protection with email and content archiving software can provide a powerful and viable approach for addressing both current and future data management challenges.

Faster, Easier Backup and Recovery

Data protection technology is stable and mature, which means that most enterprises already rely on it. Yet, the definitive reason to back up data remains the ability to recover it. But how quickly and how much data can be recovered varies significantly across enterprises. While data protection technology has matured over the last 10 years, software and hardware vendors are developing new innovations to provide enterprises with more cost-effective options and methods for data protection. For example, improved features in the areas of disk-based backup, reporting, server recovery and scalability can increase backup performance and reduce administrative costs.

When weighing what backup technologies to implement, administrators must look for features that improve and simplify how they control, protect and recover their enterprise data, regardless of where or how it is stored, including:

• Managing, monitoring and reporting on your backup environment through a Web-based portal;
• Redefining recovery with optimized disk-based data protection functionality;
• The capability to instantly backup and recover data using a variety of snapshot technologies; u Consolidating disk-based data protection for NAS, FAS and server environments;
• Increasing scalability and reliability helps 24/7 enterprises protect and recover data with confidence;
• Recovering both data and servers from one console, which enables the administrator to quickly rebuild a single server or multiple servers in parallel; and
• Protecting investments in legacy systems and hardware while also supporting emerging databases and applications such as Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Lotus Notes R7.

Archiving Better Enables Compliance

Protecting data with advancements in backup technologies is only the first step of a two-step process. The importance of email as a communication tool, and the resulting increase in both electronic discovery and compliance requirements, presents both storage and backup administrators with new challenges. Backups, as secondary copies of data, are designed to help companies recover data damaged as the result of human error or another event, such as a natural disaster. By contrast, archiving takes copies of older primary data that are typically no longer accessed on a daily or short-term basis and moves that data to another location, ideally less expensive storage, where it is indexed and searchable by the organization in a long-term archive. Given the amount of duplicate data that exists within enterprises, especially within email systems, reducing primary storage through active email archiving can substantially improve backup and restore performance.