The Case for Active Archiving: Flexible. Complete. Affordable

With the typical employee sending and receiving nearly 25,000 e-mail messages per year, e-mail has evolved into a primary "knowledge asset." This has created the need for an infrastructure strategy that supports retention policies and makes messages accessible across the enterprise. When e-mail is under control, organizations can better leverage critical business intelligence and comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as other rules requiring all electronic correspondence to be stored and quickly retrievable in the event of an audit or litigation.

Increasingly, enterprises are turning to an active archiving solution as their preferred e-mail management strategy. Such a solution addresses every aspect of e-mail management, providing comprehensive capture and indexing, easy retrieval, effective sampling and review, powerful storage management, and policy-based lifecycle management. Scalable, simple and flexible, active archiving solutions are easy to deploy and use and offer a low total cost of ownership.

The Old Way: Slow and Expensive

Traditionally, e-mail archiving has been accomplished by manually backing up files from a given point in time to tape. There are several major drawbacks to this approach. Because e-mail users receive, read and delete multiple messages on any given day, a point-in-time archive is unlikely to be comprehensive. Furthermore, effectively searching backup tapes for messages that meet specific criteria or contain key words requires restoring all archive tapes for the period in question, as well as filtering and deleting duplicate messages. This is a time-consuming and expensive process that often cannot be accomplished within the time period required for legal discovery.

Some vendors offer document management solutions that attempt to address these issues by allowing users to tag e-mail messages with metadata before moving them to an archive. While this allows for more accurate indexing and easier retrieval, it remains a selective process that fails to capture all e-mail. These methods can lead to higher administrative costs associated with managing storage and retrieval, and an increased risk of regulatory fines and legal fees related to non-compliance.

The New Way: Active is Better

Active archiving offers archiving, indexing, hierarchical storage management (HSM), records retention management and enhanced compliance capabilities, providing a comprehensive and cost-effective method for leveraging crucial business information contained in e-mail, while also ensuring compliance with regulatory and legal requirements. Active archiving solutions automatically capture all inbound, outbound and external e-mails, and accurately scan and categorize e-mail based on the content and context of the message, header and attachment. By eliminating the need for employees to manually tag messages with metadata, active archiving results in more accurate indexing and reduced administration time.

For improved risk mitigation, an effective active archiving solution automatically routes messages violating corporate policies to a designated supervisor for review, allowing non-compliance issues to be quickly identified and resolved. Some active archiving solutions today incorporate powerful categorization technology with training-based analytics that enable categorization to be refined and improved over time. Retention rules can be customized for different departments or employee groups, resulting in a flexible solution that can easily be deployed across the entire enterprise. Many active archiving solutions offer single-instance storage, which prevents duplicate messages and attachments from being archived, and maximizes storage space. Messages are migrated to storage media using an HSM approach, with the local message deleted and replaced by a link to the archive. This allows users to access messages but maintains enterprise control over retention. When users make changes to an archived e-mail, it is re-archived as a new record and the original is preserved.

Active archiving offers enterprises a comprehensive e-mail management solution with a lower total cost of ownership. Easy deployment and seamless integration with e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook® result in faster employee adoption with lower implementation and training costs. With training-based analytics, searches get more accurate over time, reducing the staff resources required to review non-compliant e-mail. Enterprises that have adopted e-mail active archiving solutions are better able to:

• Comply with regulatory and corporate governance requirements;

• Retain control of the e-mail management process;

• Reduce staff resources and administrative costs associated with e-mail management; and

• Leverage and maximize electronic "knowledge assets."

Active Archiving Solutions

Active archiving solutions like ClearStory Systems' Radiant MailManager™ deliver a complete, highly scalable e-mail management solution that helps organizations comply with recent regulations and manage their knowledge assets more efficiently. Radiant MailManager is easy to implement and use, with highly configurable rules for policy and category management. Because it fully integrates with Microsoft Outlook, training is minimized and adoption is maximized. Radiant MailManager's training-based analytics make searches and e-mails flagged for review increasingly accurate over time, reducing the resources required by enterprises to review non-compliant e-mail. For more information, visit ClearStory Systems