Email Archiving

The storage market offers a wide array of opportunities for the reseller community, but in recent times one area in particular has been rising to the top of the storage requirement agenda.

Email archiving enables firms to save and protect data contained in email messages so it can be accessed quickly at a later date. In itself email archiving is a best business practice which firms should adopt and resellers are constantly attempting to sell offerings which are inline with such practices. However, email archiving has another ace up its sleeve because more legislation and government regulation have been, and are being, introduced covering the retention of electronic data for certain period of time.

At the beginning of the year, the importance of email archiving was pulled into the public limelight after it was revealed that the White House has no comprehensive email archiving system. It was the Bush administration which scrapped President Clinton’s previous archiving system, which was installed due to specific court orders. The issue caused uproar with those who know the importance of such a system, but it also offered great exposure for the concept of email archiving. At the same time it highlighted the possibility of just how many firms must be failing to archive their data properly. If the White House is failing, think how many firms must be?

Email archiving received further mainstream coverage earlier this year when the first public email archive system was created by the Powerhouse Museum. The museum is asking the public to submit emails in an effort to capture a snapshot of contemporary life.

IDC expects that the worldwide email archiving applications market will approach US$1.4 billion in 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.4 percent.

Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for Compliance Infrastructure at IDC, said growth around the market has been driven by financial services customers looking to transition their old SEC/NASD compliant archiving solutions into more robust message archiving platform architectures.

“Customers are demanding integrated workflows that support legal discovery and audit requirements. In addition, the aggressive reduction in the cost of connectivity and storage, combined with rising awareness of the new legal regime, underpin the greenfield opportunities in the non-SEC compliant SMB and mid-market segments,” said Tero.

Laura DuBois, research director for storage software at IDC, said: “Email archiving is increasingly fuelled by both business and IT requirements for electronic discovery and regulatory compliance as well as performance, capacity, and storage optimisation. We expect over the next five years to see email and other content archiving solutions converge as firms continue to focus on managing information versus infrastructure.”

“There are two parts to email archiving,” explained Paul McClure, archiving specialist A/NZ at vendor CommVault. “The first covers compliance and auditing where you capture every message in an organisation and make it available for search. The second is around space management where you look at emails which have not been searched for a while and move them away from your primary storage.”

McClure said that the space management piece of email archiving is particularity strong across the Australian market as it creates the option to establish an infinite pit of data.

“Victoria has laws around document unavailability and that covers making companies have to keep data for x-amount of time. Federal laws are on the way and it is likely to be very similar to the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) rules in the U.S.”

The FRCP rules govern civil procedure in the U.S. and ensure that courts are no longer tolerant of organisations that have not implemented timely programs to accurately retrieve emails. The U.S. also has the well publicised Sarbanes-Oxley regulation which not only lays down legislations for the financial side of corporations, but also the IT departments who have to store corporations’ electronic records. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act states that all business records, including electronic records and electronic messages, must be saved for “not less than five years”.

Gerry Sillars, managing director of CommVault Oceania/ASEAN, said present legislations are targeted at specific industries, but this will change to affect every type of firm who will have to keep electronic documentation for a certain amount of time.

“In terms of how common email archiving is, 50 percent of our new business is driven by archiving requirements,” he said.

Sillars said one of the major advantages of email archiving is being able to manage Microsoft Exchange and other email systems. For example, if an employee leaves to join a rival organisation, efficient email archiving can stop employees from taking potential sensitive information with them into their new role.

“This is a very common problem,” said Sillars. “Email archiving is the only way to utilise the compliance part and lock down
the data. 80 percent of a company’s IP is in emails.”

CommVault has made the move of offering an integrated enterprise search engine with a familiar Google-like interface.

On the channel side, Sillars said it has taken time for resellers to get to grips with email archiving. “The channel is getting there. They are selling to different types of people with email archiving and most of our resellers are used to selling to IT people. But they are having to get used to selling to business people too.”

Sillars added that email archiving is an easy up-sell option for resellers who can return to their install base and engage on an email archiving level.

Clive Gold, EMC’s director of product marketing, said: “Email archiving is an essential business practice. We have seen huge demand over the last three years. It has also become more available for smaller firms, and at EMC we have a whole practice around back-up and archiving.”

Gold said the main driver behind email archiving demand is quelling the huge growth in unstructured data.

“To keep up with the growth in data we have to get smarter. Compliance and governance is also an important issue, just in case people ask for copies of previous emails.”

Gold said there are tax laws in place which require firms to keep information and much of that information is stored on email.

“To have all that information archived is a huge benefit.”

Gold said EMC has a number of partners that carry aspects of email archiving, with the next big area likely to be file archiving.

“We have enabled our partners to go to customers and look at the amount of data that firm has not looked at for a certain amount of time and give them a profile where they can move that information into archiving, where the cost of keeping that data is [halved].”

Gold said email archiving enables resellers to reach customer base and expand consulting services:“There are partners who have virtually started businesses from this area.”

HP recently flagged its intent in the archiving space after it announced that they have signed a pre-bid agreement to acquire Tower Software, a document and records management software company that is based in Canberra.

The acquisition of Tower will add electronic records management to HP Software’s existing e-discovery and compliance capabilities in information collection and retention. This includes both records management and identification, which have become increasingly important for organisations due to rules and regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.

Speaking at the time of the announcement, Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of information management software at HP, said: “In reaction to increased business regulation, electronic records management has moved from a back-office task to a business-critical function. The combination of the HP and Tower software portfolios is expected to be hugely beneficial to the legal and IT organisations of businesses all over the world.”

Martin Harwood, Tower Software’s CEO, said: “The combination of HP and Tower will allow us to scale and provide our customers with a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise information and IT management software solutions. We have partnered with HP for years, so today’s news is exciting because we will now be able to enhance how we serve our joint customers and partners.”

There was nothing unique about HP’s intent. MessageLabs has also been upping its email archiving game after releasing the MessageLabs Archiving Service last year. The offering deals with all external and internal email and allows speedy access to messages once archived, said the firm. The service includes new attachment stubbing technology, which can reduce the amount of Exchange storage needed by replacing attachments in users’ inboxes with a link to the same document stored in the archive.

In relation to the release, Chris Reid of IT consultancy Morse, said email archiving is gaining importance with IT directors, but with many current systems, the process of locating and restoring archived emails can be “painstakingly laborious”. He added: “Businesses are under increasing pressure from compliance regulations to store all business correspondence for longer periods of time, which means storage needs are increasing exponentially.”

With strong vendor focus and demand on both the compliance and business practice sides, email archiving is a solid bet for resellers. The channel should be encouraged to add email archiving offerings to new sales, alongside approaching their existing customer base for further sales.