The email vault: Archiving against litigation
The email vault: Archiving against litigation
An archived email could one day be the key to escaping an awkward and expensive court room drama. It’s pulling big business for email archiving vendors and offering a new wave of convenience for end-users.
A ‘get out of jail free’ card
Engineering is a job of perfection and precision. In the world of construction, things might not always go according to plan. The important thing is finding out when and where the mistakes were made.
Paul Chamberlain, commercial manager of the Duffill Watts Group in New Zealand says as an engineering company, they’re heavily involved in the outcomes of building and construction. “But sometimes, things go wrong. If it’s us who designed it wrong, then we’re in trouble.”
Like any similar firm, Duffill Watts have had their fair share of litigation threats but have managed to come out relatively unscathed. Things do go wrong, but as long as Duffill Watts can pull out the records and prove their designs are to the specs requested, they’ve done their jobs perfectly.
“It comes down to whether we created the plans, according to the specifications that were given to us,” says Chamberlain who cites one particular example of a client unsuccessfully threatening legal action against the firm. “We found it (the specs) in an email, showed it to the client and the five million went away. He went and tried to sue somebody else.”
For Chamberlain, the solution to proving they’re undertaking their work correctly was the CA Message Manager, a product that he says is ‘simple to operate’ and does one task and one task well. “We like to resolve things quickly, so we don’t get into litigation and have things go wrong. That’s how we got into email archiving.”
Email archiving is big business.
There’s no need to go scaremongering, we all know how email mismanagement can cost an organisation in the court room. But email archiving is not just to reduce legal risk or aid in the case of litigation; it’s also a matter of convenience and common sense.
According to global recruitment agency Kelly Services, 83 percent of Australians are actively using the Internet and email at work. For AIIM International and Kahn Consulting, that figure expands to 100 percent when considering how many companies are utilising email to conduct business. 93 percent of them use it to answer customer inquiries, 84 percent discuss strategy and 71 percent negotiate contracts via email. That’s a lot of sensitive and important information flying back and forth across servers, records that could one day make or break an organisation during litigation.
The market for email archiving is a healthy one and it’s only going to get better. Email is no longer a throw away comment, it’s a business record and we’re sending more and more of the stuff every year. But an archiving system is not just about managing growth nor the move to be compliant with regulation, it’s also about adopting an information management strategy into an organisation’s infrastructure.
“The Australian New Zealand market is really starting to put the heat on IT managers over what they should be doing with this information,” says Daryush Ashjari, systems engineer for EMC Australia and NZ. “Yes, we might need to keep information for ten years, but the IT department needs to find out just how it can be retrieved and accessed later on.”
Exploring the benefits.
Ashjari outlines the business enabling benefits of archiving by exploring the facts and figures. According to the Ferris Research, average enterprise users spend over 60 minutes managing email every day. If employees are payed around $40 an hour then the expense for a company of a thousand employees “can be measured at an annual expense of over a million dollars in lost productivity,” says Ashjari.
For Hitachi Data Systems and their archiving solution, it’s all about promoting data as it’s needed throughout a lifecycle. “Most organisations who implement archiving systems, tend to quickly realise it’s not just a one-way street,” says Adrian Deluca, systems engineer for HDS. “Data is active, it might have peaks and troughs in its value, that’s what we’re trying to redefine in the market…Most other solutions tend to be static and just provide a repository where data goes to rest, after a couple of years customers find they are stuck in these silos.”
HDS urges customers to look at archiving from a holistic perspective and seek scalable solutions that can meet the forecasted growth of data and the regulations in place to control it. “How we think about implementing today is going to change over the next few years, especially with retention regulations,” says Deluca. “Think about your ability to retrieve information once an application has been retired.’
For HDS ‘active archiving’ harnesses the ability to incorporate into archiving the automation of data mobility. “We shouldn’t be placing expectations on IT departments to process data manually,” says Deluca.
CA pushes the need to reduce IT costs as a fundamental benefit of archiving. “The idea being, that you keep closest to the user, the things they use the most. Rather than going to traditional backup, so you have better end-user productivity,” says Jacob Van Der Eyk, solutions architect for CA.
In Australia and New Zealand, CA believes email archiving has evolved from enforcing email quotas to a business issue. “Now, it’s really the business that’s starting to engage and they can see they are reducing costs, but are also seeing a higher level of litigation coming into this space and starting to realise that email is a business record, so you have to determine what to do with it and what kind of retention period it requires,” says Van Der Eyk.
Finally, email archiving can be taken off the IT budget and placed into the hands of another department. “The IT guy can get excited and say ‘we’re already doing that and we can do these additional things also!’ says Van Der Eyk.
But in the end, email archiving is about retaining information. In the case of litigation, a judge no longer accepts that you weren’t able to restore the server. Whoever has and exposes the information often looks the least guilty no matter what the information reveals.
Solution for the generation
Email archiving by nature, is a long term strategy. So just how do you define polices for email retention and what happens if you want to later ditch the solution you choose?
According to Ashjari, an organisation’s strategy should be in sync with the enterprise content management vision. “We need to understand what is the purpose of archiving? Then the business can deploy a case for it themselves,” says Ashjari. “People don’t want to be locked down. We can extract, restore the native information and allow it to be pushed back into the corporate server.”
More important is the continuous growth of email data and its thirst for storage space. Research from the Radicati Group suggests that the average storage requirements for a 1000 seat company will grow to 320 gigabits per month in 2008
For all those wondering how long their personal emails will be retained in their organisation’s email archiving system, Chamberlain has some welcome advice. “Don’t write stupid stuff in emails, if you want to say stupid stuff, then say it over the phone, that’s what it’s there for!”
Where does all the spam go?
If nine out of ten emails sent across the world are actually just spam then it seems a waste of time and space to start archiving such junk for years.
“We encourage customers to deal with spam issues prior to email going to the corporate server,” says Ashjari. “As soon as information reaches the corporate server, from a compliance perspective, we are obligated to archive it.”
“An email archiving solution is not there to cover a huge flood of spam. We’d recommend a CA solution in front of that as it should really be stopped at the door.”
Taking the pressure off the SMBs
A hosted email archiving service is another means to taking the pressure off email retention and a practical option for the small to medium sized business. But with all that business information taken somewhere else, how do you know who’s reading what?
According to David Hahn, director of product management at the New York office for MessageLabs, their hosted service is primarily about security. “We wanted to provide ease and management functionality and the same level of security as if they were hosting it themselves,” he says.
Hahn groups customers going down this path into three categories: There are those who are driven by the rules and policies of compliance, those recognising the value of retaining email in the case of litigation or disaster recovery and those simply burdened by huge volumes of email suffocating their servers.
But with all these different reasons, there is one common thread. “We’ve targeted the sub 500 organisations in Australia,” says MessagLab’s APAC marketing manager, Andrew Antal. “We’ve avoided large organisations with existing infrastructure and targeted those that probably have a mandate to deploy something from headquarters.”
“They don’t want to increase the expense of email infrastructure,” says Hahn. “Our service offers an endless inbox.”
It’s an endless inbox with what MessageLabs says, has a lifetime retention policy of 999 years. Does it suddenly self-destruct? One thing’s for certain, we won’t live long enough to know for sure.