Email archiving for storage managers

With increasing data growth and strict regulatory compliance requirements, securing any application containing business-critical data is crucial. As a result, storage managers are increasingly adopting email archiving products. By separating incoming email into active and inactive data sets, email archiving can help data centre professionals get a grip on the email systems their businesses rely so heavily on as a communications vehicle.

In this SearchStorage.co.UK podcast, UK storage bureau chief Antony Adshead discusses email archiving with Anthony Dickinson, principle consultant at GlassHouse Technologies in the UK. Dickinson touches on the storage aspects of email archiving, how an email archiving system works, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of this technology.

Click on the icon below to hear Dickinson's full podcast:

Here are some highlights from the email archiving podcast:

What is email archiving?

Email archiving is essentially the separation of the email that an organisation receives. It is basically the technology and processes that surround being able to cope with the sheer volume of data resulting from the massive amounts of email in a given organisation. Specifically with email, it's really singled out in the archiving world because it has surpassed even the use of the telephone in business today.

How does email archiving work?

With traditional archiving, you have a point-in-time copy of data that is backed up and stored on a moveable media. With email archiving, you have active archiving, which will move the primary email away from the server when the inbox is full and will leave a symbolic link instead of a sub-file. A symbolic link will allow you to perform single instancing, which will allow multiple users to see multiple copies of an email as a single copy of the email.

What are the benefits of email archiving?

The benefits of email archiving fall into the cost, risk and service elements of IT in an organisation. Email archiving can help regulatory compliance efforts, help reduce the volume of data generated from storing emails and improve the performance of your email server.

What are the pitfalls of email archiving?

The pitfalls of email archiving really relate to deploying an effective email archiving solution. One of the challenges of deploying an email archiving solution is that not all email in an organisation has to be kept to satisfy compliance requirements. For example, a larger organisation may have a trading arm that needs their email archived for regulatory compliance, while the rest of the company does not. Separating these two user groups onto different servers while still using the email archiving system can be a challenge.

If you want to learn more about email archiving, be sure to join us on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 for our free Storage Decisions UK Email and File Archiving Seminar in London at the Hilton London Metropole.

This was first published in August 2009

 

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