Closing The Gap Between Email Archiving And Disaster Recovery
These days, businesses seek to adopt more compliant email practices in order to deal with the prospect of litigation and eDiscovery requests effectively. To this end, there is a demand for not just email archiving, but complete disaster recovery. Email archiving has been a godsend since regulations and compliance laws started popping up. When eDiscovery requests come in, it’s a blessing. But in so many organizations, there is a wide gap between email archiving and disaster recovery, and it could throw a wrench in the works when an eDiscovery request comes in.
Where does your organization store email?
Think of it this way: how many different systems are storing email in your organization, right now? Imagine over 5 different places: the main server, the backup server, the email archive itself, an archive backup, local user archives, on server backups of those. There could be 5 or 7 copies of each message, and this makes it tough to follow a main data retention policy.
The main email archive must contain every email. This is so that it can be fully compliant with eDiscovery best practices. In addition, email messages have to be deleted from every storage medium when a data retention policy dictates so. The problem is, the gap between archiving systems and disaster recovery processes can lead companies to make some serious mistakes. The mistakes can ruin a good eDiscovery strategy because costly searches have to be carried out for messages stored outside the archive.
- Sometimes, messages are deleted from a storage medium on time, but they are allowed to stay on in the primary email inbox beyond the retention period.
- The email messages stored in local archive files (like Microsoft PST) are unmanaged and allow access to emails outside their retention period.
- Back-up tapes are often poorly managed and can retain data for longer then the retention period states. Sometimes, they are stored indefinitely.
This causes a myriad of problems for companies when archiving and email disaster recovery cross paths in the wrong way. The best way to approach this problem is to simplify the systems and consolidate them on a proper compliant email archiving system, while moving away from on-computer email archives.
Stay tuned for important updates about email disaster recovery from Jatheon.To learn more about email archiving watch our "Osterman's 2012 Outlook for Email Archiving" webinar now!