An unenviable task

By Stuart Finlayson

The role of the email manager has taken on enormous importance in recent months. Stuart Finlayson talks to the experts who explain the challenges.

We have heard all about the consequences of failure to adhere to guidelines on email management, with huge fines and even jail sentences awaiting those who fail to comply, forcing the issue up to a far loftier position on the "to-do" list of CEOs more than at any other point in time.

The fallout means the enormity of the task facing email administrators has never been so great: "I think database administrators are faced with a challenge today that is quite unlike anything they have faced before in terms of the criticality to the databases," says Walt Kasha, senior Windows platform specialist at Veritas. "The numbers of what we refer to as recovery point objective and recovery time objective have become so low, meaning that [administrators] cannot afford to lose data or have the system down for any time at all, so as a result of these regulations, there is a squeeze effect going on where everything has to be maintained and everything has to be available. Everything also has to recoverable, and we have to do it beyond the speeds that the tape technology can produce."

Roy Atkins, senior technology consultant for Microsoft infrastructure at Hewlett-Packard, agrees that email administrators today face an unenviable task: "The main issues faced by email administrators today are message storage and archiving, and emails containing viruses and spam. With the increased usage of email, the increase in average message sizes and the legal obligations of organisations for keeping a history of communications, email storage is an increasingly difficult problem to deal with."Atkins attributes this largely to the fact that administrators are faced with maintaining and keeping email databases manageable and handling the increased pressure from users for storage space, with users typically resorting to creating personal storage files, in turn creating an additional management headache.

Gerry Lahiffe, Legato's channel manager, Australia/New Zealand, says it is the sheer volume of email traffic doing the rounds today that is presenting email administrators with such a challenge: "Because of the exponential growth in the number of emails being received and in the size of emails being sent and received email administrators are faced with increased challenges around backup/restore from a central perspective but also increases in individual restore requests from users due to accidental deletion of emails.

"As email servers are being saturated so rapidly, administrators are grappling with trying to keep the email service available. Administrators need a means to automate the process of moving emails from the email servers to alternative storage mediums to reduce the likelihood of saturation, reduction in backup times, increases in availability and removal of individual user mailbox restrictions requests."

Sal Fernando, chief technical architect, Veritas Australia/New Zealand asserts that the business critical aspect of email makes the pressure that bit greater: "Companies are placing higher and higher importance on their email as it's basically the outward facing part of a business, so if your Exchange database is down, you can't really do business."

Brett Vincent, regional manager for IBM data management software, echoes Fernando's view, adding that the increased use of email for business has given rise to a range of storage and content management issues: "The storage issues include the cost of support staff, continual capital expenditure on additional storage, cost of media, and the time impact associated with backup and recovery.

"There are also key content management issues to consider. How do you store this information long term, how do you find it and how do you for search it? As everyone knows with their own email 'inboxes' - filing email is one thing, finding it is another! This problem is exacerbated with archived email in the enterprise. Customers tell us that requests for locating 'aged' emails are almost as time consuming as trying to locate a physical piece of paper. Finding attachments is also a major issue."

What do US corporate meltdowns mean for Australia?

While businesses in Australia do not (yet!) face the same stringent regulations and penalties as have now been imposed in the US for failure to adhere to email archiving legislation, HP's Roy Atkins argues that the severity or otherwise of non-compliance with regulations should not come into the equation when companies are considering their email retention policies.

"Irrespective of specific regulatory controls, best practice dictates that records are kept to reduce risk and provide evidence should it be required in litigation. Legal disclosure orders may require all email to be produced pertinent to an event, person, client, date and so on. Locally, companies are starting to realise the importance of having an email retention policy and structured process by which key emails are archived and stored throughout the usable life of the data."

Gartner's Asia Pacific storage research director Phil Sargeant is convinced that what is happening in the US has had a definite impact on the market over here: "There are different government regulations in different countries but there is no doubt that with respect to email, there is a lot of work being done on archiving and retrieval of email. It's growing hugely at a rate equal in relative terms in Australia as anywhere else in the world."

Veritas' Kasha agrees, but stresses that not all email administrators are rushing to ensure their company is compliant in fear of what they may consider to be a Herculean task to adapt, and are instead looking to soldier on with technology that was not designed to cope with the vastly increased payload of information companies are now expected to store: "Regulation is having a tremendous impact. What a lot of people are facing is that emails essentially never get deleted and administrators are largely responsible for this almost out of control situation of data accumulation.

"What we have seen in the seminars that we have conducted is that these rooms are filled with people who have their heads buried in the sand in the sense that they've got these new service level agreements and yet continue to use existing technology that was really designed for smaller databases and for systems that were dealing in recovery times of hours rather than minutes.

"We demonstrate through a graphical curve what technologies you have to employ as you get to higher degrees of availability for the applications you are using. The investment has to go up accordingly, but we are still seeing customers out there with expectations of zero downtime or near zero downtime, and yet they are strictly relying on backup technology to get there."

Back to school?

It seems then that a degree of education to heighten corporate awareness of the consequences of failing to bring their email systems up to code may be necessary."Outside of the technical IT challenges that administrators are faced with, the greatest exposure an organisation has commercially are the legal implications of not being compliant with current Australian law related to email compliance," says Legato's Lahiffe. "Email administrators need education on these legal implications as well as the technical IT challenges they are faced with."

HP's Roy Atkins believes the problem is more often a lack of resources rather than a lack of awareness or will on the part of email administrators to meet regulatory requirements: "Email archiving is more a business issue as opposed to a technical issue and as such, there needs to be education at the business level. Administrators are typically fully aware of the benefits of email archiving to solve their immediate technical issues, but lack the business exposure or the budget to implement the necessary infrastructure."

But that situation - according to Veritas' Sal Fernando - is changing, with Australian email regulations set to tighten, as they have done already in the US, triggering a greater sense of urgency in many organisations to manage their email more effectively."Speaking as an Australian, we tend to thumb our noses at regulations, but having said that, regulations do need to be put in place. Veritas is a US company and as such we are mandated by the SEC to provide information to them whenever it is needed. I guess the regulatory bodies are doing the right thing, taking into account what happened in the US."

"There is no doubt that what has happened in the US has had a knock-on effect in terms of interest shown by Australian companies in this technology. We have had to follow the US in certain areas, but in a lot of areas we tend to be ahead. Certainly though, in the areas of protection of data, Australia mirrors what is happening in the rest of the world."