Can one email archiving approach meet all your needs? (Part 4 of 4)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In my last  three posts, I introduced the idea that there are multiple approaches to archiving and took a deeper look at the two most widely-used methods – mailbox archiving and journaled archiving.  I conclude this series of posts by addressing the question that often comes up:  Can one email archiving approach equally solve both your mailbox storage management challenges as well as meet your legal discovery and compliance requirements?

As I mentioned in my first post, companies may have many goals when they decide to implement an email archive, but some goals may end up being in conflict with others.   For example, the IT group may implement an archive for mailbox storage management purposes and let users control which messages are archived and which ones are deleted.   However, by doing this, they defeat the organization’s retention policy and make the archive a meaningless place to manage preservation orders for a litigation hold. 

Most of the in-house archiving software products implement both mailbox archiving and journal archiving and allow customers to enable both approaches as a way to deal with the limitations of each.  Not only does this not provide an overly practical solution, it also results in duplicate storage of content (despite what they might tell you about single instance storage).

At Fortiva, we use journal archiving because we wanted to ensure that we could address the litigation readiness and compliance requirements.  However, as I mentioned in my previous posts, using journaling as a source of information that you plan to expose to end-users requires additional work (that most archives don’t attempt to do).  We do the extra work to understand routing of messages and assignment to end-user mailboxes so that one copy of the message can be used for both end-user access as well as discovery purposes. 

Fortiva offers capabilities such as stubbing, a process similar to mailbox archiving where a periodic scan of mailboxes is performed.  Unlike implementing mailbox archiving on top of journaling, we scan mailboxes and then use our powerful real-time search engine to find the item that already exists in the archive to determine what the stub (or shortcut) in the mailbox should point to.  Doing so allows us to leverage the single copy of the data that is already in the archive via journaling.

It must be noted that Fortiva’s solution is built around a retention policy engine that assigns retention when messages are archived.  This means that neither users nor IT can simply say “I don’t need this anymore” and delete items at will.  As such, while Fortiva provides the added value of addressing storage management challenges, our on-demand archive is most suited for those that have a need for consistent retention as a core business requirement. 

While most modern archiving solutions offer some capabilities to address legal discovery and storage management challenges, each will have limitations on one area or the other – partially because the “optimal” business rules for each problem are in conflict. Thus, knowing what your primary goal will help you decide which email archiving approach is best suited for your organization.

Approach 2: Journaled Archiving (Part 3 of 4)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In my last two posts, I talked about the fact that there are multiple approaches to archiving, each with its pros and cons. I also took a closer look at one of those approaches – mailbox archiving.  In this post, I will dive more deeply into another widely-used approach – journaled archiving – including how it works and what problems it is best suited to address.

Journaled archiving relies on a feature in the mail system that captures a copy of every message in transport (as it is sent/received) and puts a copy in another mailbox.  This copy of the message is stored as an attachment to a message known as a journal report, which contains additional information about the actual recipients of the original message.  The archiving system then uses this “journal mailbox” as a source of messages to be captured (and typically deletes the content once it has been captured).  Some outsourced solutions rely on the customer configuring journaling to deliver to a remote SMTP address.

Strengths

• Complete capture of email messages
  The journaling process places a copy of every message that is sent/received into a separate mailbox at the same time that a user receives it in their mailbox.  A user choosing to delete the message in their own mailbox has no bearing on whether the message gets archived. 

• A single, complete picture of each message
  As the journaling process includes BCC information and expansion of distribution lists, the archiving system can provide a full picture of the original message.  While multiple Exchange servers can increase the complexity on this front (because multiple journal reports may be created), the data exists to allow an archiving system to collapse the data into a single message containing all information about the actual recipients.

Weaknesses

• Providing end-user access to their own mail is difficult
  To provide end-users with access to the messages that they sent or received, an archiving system has to determine which mailboxes a message was actually delivered to.  The address information on journal reports is insufficient to archive this, as forwarding and routing rules must be factored into the equation.   While it is possible to do this (and Fortiva does), most other journal mail systems do not, resulting in journaled messages being available only to IT or legal that have rights to see all mail.

• No direct ability to modify/stub messages
  There is no connection between a journal report in the journaling mailbox and the messages that live in users’ mailboxes.  Replacing message content in users’ mailboxes with a pointer to the message captured using journaling, requires the archiving system to use complex lookup routines based upon content similarity.  Fortiva uses this approach, but most firms do not.

Appropriate Uses of Journaled Archiving

Best suited for: Legal and Regulatory Compliance
Journaled archiving is the Microsoft-recommended approach for capturing data for legal discovery and compliance requirements.  It allows for the complete capture of all messages in a single, unified view.

Not usually well-suited for: Email Storage Management*
Unless the archiving vendor specifically implements other processes to cleanup user mailboxes, journaled archiving approaches won’t address storage management challenges. Some journaled archiving solutions, including Fortiva, have implemented attachment stubbing (replacing attachments with a link to the file in the archive) to address this.

Not usually well-suited for: End-user Access*
Unless the archiving vendor specially implements techniques to determine which users actually received mail, users will either not be able to access their own mail, or will be granted access to a subset of the messages that they actually received. Some solutions, such as Fortiva, have developed a way to overcome this, allowing end-users to fully access all their archived mail.  Because journaled archiving isn’t working against the users’ mailbox, it can’t record which folder each user chooses to file the messages into.

* NOTE - As a point of reference (and self-disclosure), Fortiva uses journaled archiving. It overcomes some of the noted limitations with additional address resolution techniques and the use of a periodic scan of users’ mailboxes to allow for the stubbing of older attachments.

Understanding the Different Approaches to Archiving Email (Part 1 of 4)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Marketing

Discussing email archiving can be challenging, because the phrase “email archiving” is interpreted in very different ways, based upon the set of problems users are trying to address. Similarly, dedicated email archiving systems are not alike, and may offer different approaches to archiving.

Before selecting an email archive, it’s important to first understand the fundamental differences between these different approaches. Each one has pros and cons, depending on your archiving goals. These goals typically include (in no particular order):

1. Providing a central, searchable, deduplicated repository of email data to use for the enforcement of litigation hold orders and the execution of legal discovery requests
2. Provision of a systematic review process to monitor content sent/received by regulated employees (generally this is only in the financial services space)
3. Providing easy access for users to their historical mail for productivity purposes, without keeping all of the mail on the production mail system
4. Maintaining access to historical information when employees leave the organization

As I will explain over my next few posts, each of the current archiving approaches has limitations when trying to address all of these challenges. As a result, the selection of an email archiving system must first consider the best archiving approach to achieve your goals. Given that these goals can be in conflict, it will be equally important to prioritize your objectives and decide which items you are willing to make compromises on.

In my next few blog posts, I will provide a high-level overview of the main archiving approaches, outlining the pros and cons of each, from my perspective. (full disclosure: Fortiva uses a journaled archiving approach)