E-mail is the data type that nobody wants to know about - it is
a huge problem. The storage teams do not want to know, the mail
teams do not know how to cope, and the compliance issues grow just
as fast as the e-mail volumes. Corporate e-mail is a ticking legal
and IT timebomb.
Recently I was reading about a
major scandal at Bear Sterns allegedly exposed through the
discovery of an e-mail message from a fund principal that
apparently stated that their fund was going to be "toast".
The first thing I thought about this was that (if true) it was a
fantastically stupid communication to put in an e-mail exchange.
Second, I wondered why it took so long to find this mail - surely
such high-profile financial managers would have their mail
exchanges monitored automatically and an exchange like this should
have rung every major alarm bell in the firm within seconds. Of
course, they could have been using an external system to get around
that we do not know at present. But this case once more highlights
the limitations of
e-mail monitoring and e-discovery, and conversely the value of
e-mail archiving.
E-discovery is in many regards simply glorified
enterprise search technology, but with the added ability to
apply legal holds to data. Just as enterprise search is limited by
the quality and location of the content it indexes, so too are
e-discovery tools. In the case of e-discovery the limitations are
often more severe: evidence may or may not be conveniently located
in an e-mail message, as seems to be the case at Bear Stearns.
More commonly evidence has to be culled from not only e-mail
stores, but also from instant messaging systems, document systems,
enterprise resource planning systems, financial and business
applications, external drives, and so on. The idea that e-discovery
is limited to mail - as many suppliers (and worryingly many buyers)
seem to think - is naive in the extreme. Yet this misplaced belief
is based on the reality that the bulk of the data you will have to
search will indeed be mail. Mail represents the largest form of
data in any organization, typically by an order of magnitude of 10x
or more.
But here's the rub. Most of that e-mail mountain consists of
redundant data or as the technical terms goes, "rubbish." As we
discuss at length in the
CMS Watch e-mail
Archiving Report, typically 80% of mail data consists of a
duplication. Yet any search tool has to treat each piece of data
equally, slowing the process down massively and shooting discovery
costs through the roof. How much more sensible to use an archiving
method to capture, filter, and reduce that volume - and ease the
burden and cost of discovery?
We estimate that the cost of 1GB of storage is about 10p
however, the cost of legal discovery on 1GB of storage would be at
least £1000, so storing everything may seem cheap on the one hand,
but is in fact spectacularly expensive should something go wrong.
Again, most EAM tools today will reduce the storage volumes by
around 80% at the first pass, so it makes a great deal of sense to
use such tools, reduce the volume of e-mail you are storing, free
up the
Exchange servers and generally live a happy life. Yet few firms
bother to do this.
From our research it seems that the reason firms do not use such
tools is that a: teams that operate the mail systems, those that
have legal responsibility over the contents of messages and those
that operate the datacentres are separate, with different budgets
and different priorities - it is that old business/IT disconnect
again. It is a real shame as there are many products on the market
these days that can return a very fast return on investment and
more importantly tidy up the mess that is your e-mail system
quickly. So even if compliance is the key driver when considering
buying an
e-mail archiving and management (EAM) system, the fact is that
vastly improved efficiency and dramatically reduced data volumes
comes as part of the parcel.
So, what did we learn from the Bear Stearns scandal? Not much
really, other than mail (and messages) continue to be the key
"gotcha" elements of the data mountain, and that we need to monitor
and manage them ever more closely. Though the monitoring elements
are far from mature, EAM tools today archive and filter very
efficiently indeed. The need to take mail and mail content
seriously is now an imperative, and building a strategy, agreeing
methods and policies, and selecting the right tools - however
complex - is a must.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal Analyst at CMS Watch leads a panel
on E-mail Management and Archive - How to Spend Wisely in the
keynote programme at Storage Expo
the UK's definitive event for data storage, information and content
management.
The event features a comprehensive free education programme and
over 100 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London
from 15-16 October 2008.