Archive to revive

TECHNOLOGY: Email archiving is what you need to recover your account space while still being able to access old messages.

Today, when a major chunk of business is conducted over the Internet, emails and instant messages have assumed the role of "the most critical communication tool" in over 93 per cent organisations in the world. There's little wonder that hundreds of thousands of messages are generated on the Internet on a daily basis.

To give you a better idea, in 1999, 9 billion emails were recorded as zipping across the world in a day. The number at present stands at 56.3 billion and is expected to reach 163.4 billion per day mark by 2007.

Now assume a situation where you run out of space on your email account and you do not want to delete any of your earlier emails in order to recover space. What is it that you do? The solution is simple: You archive your emails and messages.

The basic function of archiving is to recover the account space while still being able to access old messages at will. And since the archived email is stored on your local machine, instead of on (distant) mail servers, the process is different from data backup.

Even within one organisation, perspectives on email management can vary widely, feels Soumitra Aggarwal, managing director, Net-App. "The legal department sees email as important to formulating its discovery response strategy.

The IT managers have storage and security concerns. The compliance people have preservation issues. And end users want better access to mail to improve productivity.

This storm of email is creating a huge and growing headache for enterprises as they try to rein in storage costs, manage vital records and keep regulators happy," he says.

According to a study by the Radicati Group, today, the average corporate user sends and receives 115 email messages a day. This translates into about 15MB of storage per day per user or nearly 300MB per month. This number is expected to grow to 160 messages a day by the end of the decade and with similar growth in storage requirements.

The basic job of any archiving software is to store and organise email (and instant messages) and take the load off the email programme.

This is usually done by "stubbing out" the messages, replacing the archived messages with pointers to the archiving system's database. Beyond that, archiving software can have many different functions.

Storage management is the universal driver for archiving. "These solutions allow you to shrink the storage footprint and dramatically reduce the backup and restore time," says Nikhil Madan, sales director, EMC Software.

A good compression algorithm can shrink a message archive by 30 per cent to 50 per cent, claims EMC. The typical cost of a four terabyte storage solution for email archival is around Rs 15 lakh for the end user.

"As more emails get archived and the total capacity requirements grow, the end user can keep adding disk capacity and upgrade over a period of time. The cost for which, of course, would be separate," says Aggarwal.

Madan seconds the investment on an email archival solution. "While the savings in capacity and cost depends on the nature of an individual system, that figure is definitely not unreasonable," he says.

Anand Naik, director (system engineering), Symantec (India and SAARC) admits that emails carry unstructured but very important data within any organisation.

"Our solutions manage content via automated, policy-controlled archiving to online stores for active retention and seamless retrieval of information. One of the key aims is to allow seamless access to the archived content for the end user," he describes.

Regulatory compliance is another reason why companies are pondering over email and messaging archival solutions. "If inadequate storage management or records management is expensive then inadequate compliance could send you to jail," says Aggarwal.

Enterprises have to comply with multiple laws and regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley for public companies, HIPAA for healthcare sector, SEC and NASD regulations for securities dealers and many others.

For instance, under the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley, public companies may get less than a week to respond to requests for general information from regulators. Since the messages have to be reviewed for relevance to decide what gets turned over to the regulators, getting the right messages back ""all the right messages "" is critical.

Managing attachments is also proving to be a nightmare for administrators. A report or spreadsheet that can run into multiple megabytes of data is delivered to hundreds or thousands of people in the company.

And if the CEO decides to send the company's annual report, complete with high-resolution pictures, as a PDF file to every employee in the company, well...they better consider archiving.