The Fortiva Blog

To Stub or Not to Stub (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In the world of email archiving, there is an ongoing argument about the value of stubbing, a process designed to help manage the storage in Exchange by replacing messages or attachments on an email server with a link to a copy of the file in an archive. I thought I’d weigh in on this topic, first by explaining the concept and looking at the pros and cons, and then (in a second post), providing a list of four best practices that businesses should follow if they’re relying on stubbing in their organization.

With the growth of email volume outpacing the reduction in total cost of storage ownership, it comes as no surprise that IT is struggling to manage Exchange storage. The real frustration for most Exchange administrators is that the vast majority of their storage is occupied with content that people almost never read. For performance and reliability reasons, Exchange is usually implemented on the most expensive of storage platforms making this usage pattern extremely expensive. Furthermore, as a transaction system, every piece of data is open for modification. This means that every piece of data needs to be backed up on a regular basis.

Introducing Stubbing – How it works
All of these factors have led IT to investigate archiving as a means to address their storage challenges. The idea is simple – focus the Exchange server on the delivery and management of current mail, and push the older mail to another repository that can be managed on less expensive infrastructure. That repository can then use archival storage management processes that allow for incremental backup of only newly added information, rather than the entire set.

Moving the data to another location (the archive) benefits IT; however, training users to change their behavior and look for this information in a new application (often with unique user interfaces and workflows) is often too cumbersome for broad adoption. To address these concerns, archiving vendors introduced features known as stubbing or shortcutting. This involves replacing the messages or attachments in users’ mailboxes with a pointer to the copy in the archive. From an end-user’s perspective, the email data is still accessible from Outlook, and yet they don’t run into their mailbox quota less often.

Stubbing Drawbacks
Stubbing isn’t without its drawbacks, however. To understand the impact on storage, you need a solid understanding of Exchange’s single instance storage model. When a message is delivered to multiple recipients within the same mailbox database (storage group), the message body and attachments are only stored once, and the message entry in each mailbox simply references the single copy of this data.

When a user modifies a message in their mailbox, Exchange creates a unique copy of the content and points the message in the user’s mailbox to that copy. As Exchange doesn’t provide any way to access the single-instance store of content, stubbing processes behave like end-user edits -- modifying messages on a mailbox by mailbox basis. If a message was sent to multiple recipients on the same mailbox database, but you only stub content for some of them, you actually increase not decrease storage by implementing stubbing. Furthermore, even though stubs may be small (typically <2K), as the stubbing process works through each mailbox, it is creating separate items in the single-instance store.

Since many elements of Exchange and data management processes are impacted by the number of entries in the tables, not just their total size, the unwinding of single-instance storage in Exchange can be problematic. As it happens, however, Microsoft Office has a habit of updating attachment metadata when a user views the item, which in most environments means that single-instance storage is pretty much non-existent within Exchange. The more of these changes that are made in Exchange between backups, the longer an incremental backup of the mail system will take.

Microsoft’s answer to the storage management problem is to change Exchange 2007 to support dramatically larger mailboxes and to change the way backup processes work so that managing these larger mailboxes databases becomes more practical. While most firms that I’ve talked to plan to increase mailbox sizes with their conversion to Exchange 2007, few are creating the 1GB mailboxes that Microsoft touts.

Conclusion
Clearly, stubbing is not the straightforward Exchange storage management solution that some vendors would have you believe. That having been said, when implemented properly, it can be a valuable tool to manage the growth of Exchange storage with minimal impact on end-user behavior. In my next post, I’ll talk about four best practices to make the most of stubbing in your organization.

Preparing for FRCP - Collection Retrieval (Part 5 of 5)

Posted by Alan Armstrong, VP Business Development

My final article in the FRCP readiness series is about Collection, Search, and Retrieval – the most expensive, tedious, and time-consuming element of the legal discovery process. To paint some context, allow me to start with a story about Dave, an Assistant General Counsel at a Fortune 500 company.

Recently I was in a meeting with 20 people, including Dave, where this company was evaluating  Fortiva against an in-house competitor. Fortiva was the underdog, as this in-house competitor is considered the leader in the space for companies who want to go through the hassle of managing their own email archive.

Dave was attending the meeting mostly out of obligation to review all the vendors being considered, but his underlying goal was to find a way to do better “Early Case Assessment”, to reduce the cost of collection and processing, and to just know, going in to a “meet and confer” meeting, what data can be discovered, and at what cost.

Until this moment in the meeting, Dave was fairly nonplussed with our discussion. His eyes were not glossing over exactly, but he definitely had not been enthused. We were in the middle of a product demonstration, when our SE began to show the Fortiva search capability. All of a sudden, there was a rustling of papers at Dave’s end of the room. Remember, there were 20 other people in this room, so I didn’t have eye contact with everyone. After a bit of mumbling back and forth, the project sponsor, Andy, interrupted: “I just want everyone to know what’s going on here … when Fortiva shows you this search capability, they are executing a search against their production database, not a demo system.”

It seems that Dave was flummoxed by the response time of the search.

This is not surprising:  in many cases, it can take days (or even weeks) for Legal to retrieve the results of a search request, and the request must be executed by IT. As a result, Dave was shocked and stopped the meeting to clarify what had just happened. For him, real-time search in the hands of Legal rather than just IT was a game changer.

Let’s just say Fortiva won that account over the in-house competitor who could not offer a search performance guarantee. (We challenge our competitors to offer an SLA around search).

Dave’s reaction reveals a lot about the difficulties that Legal has in meeting its objectives. Knowing what kind of data the company has and being able to search and retrieve it can be very costly and time consuming.  And because a “meet and confer” must occur within 99 days of filing, counsel must know what data exists, where it exists and the cost and timeframe of retrieval.  Dave and others in his situation have told me that it is quite common for legal to be unsure about what it can deliver and at what cost.  This can result in over-promising and under-delivering, not to mention the possibility for fines and “negative inferences”. The search technology we showed him was exciting precisely because it would enable Dave to know what he has and make a more informed decision sooner.

Bottom line, here is some advice to prepare for e-Discovery:

1. Ensure you can identify sources of data and be prepared to  start to collect, search and review relevant email data when notice of suit first received
2. Invest in real-time search technology
3. Ensure data is easily searchable to perform early case assessment

Hope this helps.

Alan

Read more on the Preparing for FRCP series - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

SaaS vs. On-Premise Email Archiving (2 of 2)

By Fortiva Blog Editor

Earlier, we mentioned that for several reasons email archiving is best managed by a SaaS specialist rather than on-premise. Here is a more in-depth look at the time, effort, and costs involved with each deployment method so that you will get a better understanding of why SaaS is the better choice for an email archive.

Planning
Before implementing an on-premise archive, IT has to conduct some upfront planning that includes identifying the required infrastructure, designing the implementation, projecting growth requirements, and determining the upfront capital costs involved. Adequate planning will run between 3 to 6 months on average. On the other hand, SaaS implementations such as Fortiva require a limited amount of planning on the customer’s part and can be done in 1 to 14 days depending on the size of the customer and number of locations involved.

Implementation
For an on-premise solution, getting up and running means purchasing the required hardware, installing the archiving software, integrating it with existing systems, and testing it to make sure that the solution does not create problems with other applications. If you want to maintain a redundant copy of the archive as a risk-reduction feature, you will have to repeat this process in a secondary data-center and adjust your budgets accordingly. On average, this entire process can take 2 to 4 months for an on-premise solution. For a SaaS solution, getting up and running just means plugging in the application and adding in the user names which can be done in a day. Total implementation time for a SaaS solution is typically 1 to 5 days.

Maintenance & Management of Data
There are several tasks that must be done on an on-going basis in order to maintain an email archive. Generally the tasks include data disposition to ensure that emails that have exceeded the retention term are deleted from the archive; backing-up the archive on a regular basis to make sure archived data is properly preserved and recoverable when required (this can be a challenge as the archive grows over time); monitoring the archive to identify problems; and troubleshooting hardware failures, outages, and other issues as they come up. For an on-premise solution, this will require a great deal of IT time and may require additional resources. However, with a SaaS solution, all these management and maintenance related tasks are taken care of by the solution provider thus allowing the customer organization’s IT team to focus on their other priorities. Additionally, SaaS solutions such as Fortiva provide customers with 24x7 monitoring and issue resolution, which is rarely the case with an on-premise archiving solution.

Performance & Upgrades
The nature of archiving is such that you will eventually run out of storage. This makes it necessary to perform ongoing capacity planning to ensure storage requirements are met as the archive grows. For an on-premise solution, this will require the purchase of additional servers and data center space as necessary. Additionally, it is important to note that technology is constantly being improved and hardware options for data storage will inevitably undergo significant changes within 3 to 5 years.  This makes the likelihood of moving archived data to newer storage technologies very high and will require a high level of expertise on behalf of your IT team. Finally, if the hardware is not upgraded as necessary, it will be difficult for on-premise solutions to search and export data in the case of discovery requests.  With a SaaS solution, the solution provider takes care of the ongoing capacity planning and has the expertise to perform complex and time-consuming tasks such as migrating data to new technologies. SaaS companies, such as Fortiva, are big on R&D and are constantly looking for ways to make the archive better and they ensure that product upgrades are automatically applied without additional costs to the customer. In addition, SaaS solutions leverage the shared infrastructure of a multi-tenant SaaS architecture to provide access to hundreds of servers on-demand ensuring enterprise-grade search performance. In fact, Fortiva is the only company in the industry who backs up their search performance with a guarantee.

Basically, the implementation of an on-premise email archive is a significant commitment and undertaking for IT which only grows as the archive increases in size. Considering the management time, effort, and costs involved with an email archive, the decision to go with a SaaS solution should be an easy one.

Proofpoint Acquires Fortiva

By Fortiva Blog Editor

Exciting times are in the horizon as it was announced today that Fortiva has been acquired by Proofpoint, a leading provider of SaaS solutions for email security, data loss prevention and email management. Proofpoint will now be offering Proofpoint Email Archiving as a complementary product to its email security platform. As stated by Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint, Inc., “Fortiva’s email archiving solution is the most advanced, secure, easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution in the market today and we’re excited to have Fortiva’s team and technology as part of Proofpoint. Fortiva’s on-demand solution is a natural extension to Proofpoint’s email security platform, so nearly all of our customers can deploy and benefit from Fortiva immediately.”

What does this mean to Fortiva's customers, partners, and friends? All this means is that customers will benefit from increased R&D investment in Fortiva products, enhanced integration of Proofpoint's complementary solutions, and access to Proofpoint's golbal support and services. Partners will also benefit from Proofpoint's world-class partner program which provides a broader portfolio of solutions.

Read the full press release to find out more about this exciting change.

Preparing for FRCP - Litigation hold (Part 4 of 5)

Posted by Alan Armstrong, VP Business Development

“Stop recycling the tapes!” Our prospects often described this as their approach to litigation holds before implementing Fortiva.

FRCP now requires that companies place a litigation hold on data immediately upon hearing of a potential lawsuit. This means that companies cannot wait even until the lawsuit is officially filed; they must place the hold upon suspicion of an impending lawsuit.

A Litigation Hold suspends disposition of information pending the outcome of a related lawsuit. The typical approach has several problems, but the primary problem is the lack of precision; when you place a hold on a set of tapes, you are retaining all of the information on those tapes, which will certainly be more information than you are required to retain.

And with more information comes a greater cost of processing and filtering, but worst of all it increases the risk of retaining information beyond its desired retention policy.

The other problem with the typical approach to litigation holds is that they often rely on end users to refrain from deleting information. After legal makes the “backup tape retention order”, the next step is often to instruct users to stop deleting any relevant information.

Does this sound dangerous? Consider:

• When legal asks an end-user to stop deleting information related to a legal case, they are frequently asking someone under investigation to preserve incriminating evidence.
• “They have been warned” doesn’t cut it. In case you are thinking that it may be OK if an end-user deletes information, even if they do so illegally, think again. The court holds the company and its lawyers responsible for the enforcement of retention policies. For examples of this, see the Qualcomm and the Intel vs. AMD cases.

Our recent survey found that companies are largely catching on. When asked whether companies had formalized and enforced a litigation hold process for email, the results were encouraging:

These numbers are a stark contrast from our survey of March 2007, when 91% said that they had no litigation hold in place.

You may rightly ask, then, what is the alternative to the blanket approach of litigation holds. The answer lies in centralizing control of the information. In the Fortiva archive, creating and enforcing a litigation hold is as easy as a few clicks, and no action is required by end users. With this approach, you can easily implement the best practices that we recommend:

1. Empower legal counsel to oversee litigation hold process and ask IT to demonstrate that litigation holds are being enforced
2. Never rely on end users to enforce a litigation hold
3. Narrow litigation hold to include only responsive information (by keyword, custodian, date range, etc)

If you follow these directions, you will no longer have to retain “all or nothing”. Take a look for yourself.

Read more on the Preparing for FRCP series - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

Preparing for FRCP - Archive as Strategic Weapon (Part 3 of 5)

Posted by Alan Armstrong, VP Business Development

In this series we are looking at the basics of FRCP compliance. In my previous article, I pointed out that many companies fail to meet the most basic federal rules because they get embroiled in debates about retention policy. Indecision means non-compliance!

I think the reason that companies fail to decide is because they are focusing on the wrong question. Most times the debate is about whether information is a legal asset or a liability, and that question cannot be definitively answered; in some legal situations, the information will be in your company’s favor while in others, it will be against you. The trouble is, the potentially incriminating information can’t really be controlled or even destroyed (too many copies exist, and once the email is sent outside your company, you don’t have the power to destroy it). In their indecision about retention policies, companies continue to go through expensive discovery procedures, and must eventually deal with the incriminating or exculpatory information.

I suggest that you consider this issue from a different angle: Information discovered early is a strategic weapon. Forget about assets and liabilities; in every legal case you’ll have to deal with both. What can make the difference, though, is the ability to pinpoint information instantaneously. With the right information in hand, your company can use the information strategically to have cases withdrawn or dismissed before they even get to the “meet and confer”, or worse yet the costly discovery phase.

To illustrate, allow me to share the story of one of our customers, anonymously of course.

John (not his real name) described a legal action that came against his company. The company was in the middle of a very large business transaction, and a supplier sensed that the company was vulnerable to a legal attack. The suit was launched, and of course legal came to IT looking for evidence. Because John had implemented an email archive (Fortiva), and imported all historical email into the archive, he was able to instantly query the archive for relevant email.

With a small and targeted set of search results, he quickly exported the data to PST and provided it to one of the company’s contract administrators. After reviewing about 100 emails, the contract administrator pulled 16 emails that clearly demonstrated than the supplier’s claim was false.

Our customer John took those 16 emails, sent them to the plaintiff, and the case was immediately dropped. Needless to say, John was pretty proud of his foresight. Because he had retained email, he had more information than the opposing side.

Bottom line: For Legal, Email, in a searchable archive, can be more than an Asset. It can be a strategic weapon that you can use to defend your company.

So how long should you retain email? If you get beyond the false dilemma of asset vs. liability, you can let the business drive retention policy. I hope that helps you simplify the whole question.

-    Alan

PS: This argument only makes sense if you have an archive that your legal counsel can search quickly and painlessly. Most archiving software is painfully slow to search, so your legal counsel may not even have imagined it would be possible to access the “strategic weapon” on their own in 20 seconds or less. That’s why Fortiva issued the Search Challenge. As far as I know, Fortiva is the only company in the industry to contractually guarantee search performance. And if our logic is right, it won’t be easy to emulate. See our series on search for the gory details.

Read more on the Preparing for FRCP series - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

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.

Approach 1: Mailbox Archiving (Part 2 of 4)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In a previous post, I introduced the idea that there are multiple approaches to archiving.  In this post, I will dive more deeply into one of the two most common approaches, known as mailbox archiving, including how it works and what problems it is best suited to address.

Mailbox archiving is the process of periodically connecting to a user’s mailbox and looking for content that matches some criteria (an archiving policy) and adding it to the archive.  While a mailbox archiving process might run on a nightly basis, typically the archiving policies are set to only store messages that are older than a certain age (typically 30-90 days).

Strengths

• Visibility to all content and state information in the mailbox
  By connecting directly to the user’s mailbox, the archiving system can see (and choose to capture) any type of content, including calendar events, that wouldn’t be sent to another user.  Similarly, they can capture which folder the user has put the item into.
• Ability to modify messages in the mailbox
  With direct access to the user’s mailbox, the original message can be modified (flagged), deleted or replaced with a pointer to the copy in the archive.
• Easy to provide end-user access
  As the archive knows which mailbox it found a message in, it can easily provide the appropriate security controls to provide users with access to the messages in their mailbox without granting access to other messages.

Weaknesses

• Incomplete set of messages are captured
  Similar to backups, any periodic snapshot activity cannot record things that arrived and were subsequently deleted between capture cycles.  Given that users read and then deleted over 50% of messages on the day they receive them, periodic capture will miss the majority of mail – even if the archiving policy is set to capture messages immediately. 
• Incomplete picture of each message’s recipients
  When a user receives a message they have no visibility to the set of recipients that were BCC’d.  In addition, if the message was sent to a distribution list, the actual set of recipients isn’t stored with the message.  In the period between message receipt and capture, the membership of the distribution list can change materially (or the distribution list can be deleted from the mail system entirely).
• Duplicate message removal is very difficult
  While digital signatures can be used to find and remove duplication of message bodies and attachments to optimize the storage within the archive, removing duplication of the messages themselves is difficult because the set of recipients may be different and the meta data about when a message was received will vary from mailbox to mailbox.  When performing legal discovery across a set of users, duplicate copies of messages from different user’s mailboxes dramatically increases the costs of reviewing messages to be produced for opposing counsel.

Appropriate Uses of Mailbox Archiving

Bested suited for: Mailbox Storage Management
Mailbox archiving is appropriate for active mailbox storage management. A significant advantage -  mailbox archiving systems can “stub” or “shortcut” messages so that users don’t need to change their behavior to access historical mail. It is important to note, however, that without an active process that removes content from user’s mailbox, an archive only aids in storage management if combined with tight mailbox quotas – requiring users to spend hours each month on manual cleanup tasks.

Not appropriate for: Legal Discovery or Regulatory Compliance
Since mailbox archiving does not ensure the archiving all messages, nor does it provide a complete view of all message traffic, it is not suitable to address legal discovery or regulatory compliance requirements.

Click here to read Part 1 of Different Approaches to Archiving Email

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)

A Legal Discovery Primer for IT - Key Definitions

Posted by Fortiva Blog Editor

As you may already know, an effective email archive can help your organization save a lot of time and effort if you ever face a legal discovery request. You need to ensure that your archiving solution is well equipped and allows you to perform several functions with ease such as enforcing an email policy, searching and retrieving data, and placing litigation holds. Being able to place litigation holds is especially important so you can save yourself from receiving a guilty verdict due to spoliation.

At Fortiva, we often hear from IT professionals who are confused about the meanings or implications of legal discovery terms.  If that sounds like you, then this series of definitions with related case examples should help you to better understand your legal counsel or HR department the next time you face an eDiscovery request.

Legal Discovery
Basically, legal discovery is a part of the pre-trial phase in a lawsuit when the parties involved in litigation can request documents and other evidence from the opposing side.  The parties can compel the production of evidence by using a subpoena or other discovery devices such as request for production and disposition.  Essentially these discovery orders can target any source of data within an organization, be it electronically stored or on paper, but frequently the email system and file servers are at the top of the list. According to Socha Consulting LLC, for the average litigation case, email represents 80% of the requested documents.

FRCP
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) governs the conduct of all civil actions brought in the U.S. Federal district courts. Recent amendments made to the FRCP require all companies to retain all their corporate correspondence (including electronic online records) and make them available to the court in case of a lawsuit, without the court having to ask for them specifically.  These amendments were developed to make court proceedings more time-efficient. A brief description of the new amendments and its implications on electronic records retention and management can be found here.

ESI
The Sedona Conference defines ESI as electronically stored information, regardless of the media or whether it is in the original format in which it was created as opposed to stored in hard copy. With over 70% of business-critical information being stored in email and other electronic messaging resources, ESI has become an increasingly important source of evidence in lawsuits today.

eDiscovery
Electronic discovery is commonly referred to as eDiscovery and is defined as the process of identifying, collecting, preparing, and producing ESI for the purpose of obtaining evidence in a legal process.

Litigation Hold
A litigation hold is a communication or process used by companies to advise their employees of pending or anticipated litigation and ensure that relevant records are not destroyed. Relevant records are documents that may pertain to the upcoming litigation and according to the FRCP, this includes email messages and attachments. Failure to preserve documents for a litigation hold can have very negative consequences during a trial (see spoliation below). A litigation hold may also be referred to as “legal hold”, “preservation order”, “suspension order”, “hold order”, “hold notice”, or “freeze notice”.

Spoliation
Spoliation is the destruction or significant alteration of evidence, or the failure to preserve property for use as evidence in pending or foreseeable litigation, audit, or government investigation. Spoliation is considered a criminal act, regardless of whether the records were destroyed intentionally or accidentally, and may result in fines or incarceration. It can also lead to a negative inference finding that can ultimately lead to a guilt verdict.

To effectively prepare for litigation, your organization must be familiar with the laws and regulations that impact your industry. Additionally, it is crucial for firms to have effective technologies in place so that they are able to respond to legal discovery requests and avoid spending a considerable amount of time and money in litigation. Later posts in this series will look at the above defined terms in more detail and provide actual case examples where a lengthy lawsuit could have been avoided had the firm implemented an effective email archiving solution.

Time to switch? Why more companies are making the move from in-house to SaaS email archiving

Posted by Praising Gaw, VP Marketing, Fortiva

It seems that every month we hear from more and more potential customers that are looking for an alternative to their in-house email archive. Generally, these companies complain about how much time it takes to manage their archive, and the headaches it involves. From constantly-growing hardware requirements to long search times and even re-indexing of data in some cases, there's no shortage of reasons why we're getting calls from unhappy IT people.   

Making it worse, the headaches keep increasing as the size of the archive inevitably grows over time. So it's not surprising that for many companies that implemented an archive 2,3, or 4 years ago, things are just now hitting a "breaking point" - and that's when they approach us. Consistently, those organizations that conduct a full cost comparison of their in-house  archive vs. Fortiva come to the same conclusion: someone else can look after their archiving better than they can, at a cheaper price, and without the headaches.

This week, we announced a customer who came to this conclusion after spending months trying to fix the issues with their in-house solution. National Financial Partners (NFP), a national network of independent financial advisors consisting of over 180 owned firms, did a detailed cost analysis and found it was going be 18-20 percent cheaper on an annual basis for them to implement Fortiva rather than continue maintaining their original archive. On top of that, they could offload the many archiving issues they had to Fortiva, leaving their IT team free to focus on other initiatives.

It's an interesting story, and one that is worth reading if you're struggling with the decision of whether to choose an in-house archive or a SaaS solution. The full case study can be found here.

Ten technical things to look for in an email archive

Posted by Praising Gaw, VP Marketing

Stephen Foskett, a journalist for Storage Magazine, posted a great list on his blog this week that highlights ten technical things to look for in an email archive. As Stephen notes, some products address all of these things, while others just cover a subset. Since not every business will require all ten things,  it's not necessarily a "checklist", but it's a really great starting point for someone who is beginning the process of selecting and implementing an email archive.

It's particularly well-written because, unlike most RFP templates that I've seen, it isn't biased towards in-house solutions, or managed/SaaS solutions for that matter. While there are some businesses that will have a strong preference for either on-premise solutions or managed solutions, more and more companies are realizing that it's in their best interest to consider both. At Fortiva, we are regularly shortlisted against software solutions, despite the fact that we are a SaaS vendor.

Stephen's top ten things to consider when choosing a provider, while by no means an exhaustive list, provides a very useful starting point to help you to identify the requirements that are important to your company and shortlist a few solutions. From there, you can dig down further into questions like scalability and total cost of ownership (TCO), which includes the amount of IT time/management required, data redundancy and backups, the capital required to build and maintain a robust and scalable infrastructure, etc.

Stephen is looking for feedback on his list (below), so feel free to comment on his blog if you know about email archiving products and you feel you could provide helpful input on any other key technical differentiators he may have missed. From my perspective, it's pretty comprehensive...the only thing I might add is the ability to integrate directly with Directory Services (such as Active Directory) to minimize administration.

Source: http://blog.fosketts.net/2008/03/31/key-technical-differences-between-email-archiving-products/

The ten technical things some email archiving products do and others do not do:

1. Capture all messages - Can the archiving system really guarantee that every message is captured?  Really?  Even if a user does the old “double-delete” and gets rid of every copy on the system before the “archive sweep” happens?

2. Search and e-discovery - It’s amazing to me that some archiving systems have really terrible search capabilities.  But more important is whether they can handle real e-discovery requests from the legal department.

3. Record user metadata - Capturing what users do with a message (read, file, ignore, forward) is a tough nut to crack, and it might just be impossible with some archiving technologies!

4. Archive stuff other than email - Some are general archives that can take just about any content, while others are purpose-built for email.  I am hemming and hawing on whether this is critical in an email archiving product, and which is preferrable…

5. Security and chain of custody - How secure is the archive content?  If the answer is “kinda” then your legal department is not going to be happy!

6. Ingest an existing mail store or PST file - It’s great when an archiving system can capture every email once it’s installed, but it’s a whole other matter to be able to pull in pre-existing content.  But beware!  You have to flag this stuff as possibly incomplete and perhaps even unreliable!

7. Integrate with mail clients - What does the end user see?  Is it an unfamiliar web link or a reassuring Outlook window?  What about Outlook Web Access users?  Or the 8,000 other email clients?

8. Allow off-line access - Can a user access the archive when they’re on a plane?  Can they see it on the train?  Would they, could they in the park?  Will you, will you when your data center goes dark?

9. Integrate with third-party tools - How well will the archive really serve legal if it can’t export messages to their favorite search tool?  Note - some can even talk directly with these products!

10. Integrate with mobile users - Ok, I am on an iPhone in the enterprise crusade, but I’ll admit that lots of folks use BlackBerries and Windows Mobile (and Symbian) too.  How can they access the archive?

How Will You Conquer E-Mail Management?

Posted by Fortiva Blog Editor

This article, which appeared in this month's Integrated Solutions Magazine, offers a good overview of some of the concerns involved in e-mail management and the growing trend toward SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to solve them.

Source: http://www.integratedsolutionsmag.com/index.php?option=com_jambozine&layout=article&view=page&aid=5709&Itemid=69

The continued explosion of e-mail leads to increased risk, threat, and cost. As such, managing e-mail has become a critical consideration not only for enterprises, but also for SMBs. Three industry experts recently discussed with me some of the concerns involved in e-mail management and the growing trend toward SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to solve them.

E-MAIL MANAGEMENT TO MINIMIZE RISK
“At its most basic level, the term e-mail management refers to the ways in which end users and businesses store and organize e-mail information, including the many attachments that are sent by e-mail such as PDF files, spreadsheets, and word processing documents,” says Eric Goodwin, CEO of Fortiva. “Today, e-mail management involves the creation and enforcement of retention policies, the optimization of storage to ensure performance, compliance with regulations, and the timely search and retrieval of e-mail data for business and legal purposes.”

While the most publicized concerns of e-mail management revolve around regulatory compliance — most familiar are probably SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) — the biggest risk factor comes from inside an organization. Improper use of company e-mail can lead to problems ranging from loss of intellectual property to violating privacy regulations. Quite often this occurs inadvertently, when an employee sends sensitive data outside of the organization without malicious intent. A simple example of this is an employee forwarding information to a personal e-mail account in order to continue working on the project while at home. Likewise, inappropriate content, such as offensive jokes, can circulate throughout a company’s e-mail system. Both situations put employers at litigation risk.

“Balancing employee privacy with the need to mitigate risk can be a difficult challenge,” says Chris Bradley, VP of marketing and business development at MessageGate. “E-mail control software uses predefined parameters and rules to look at the context and content of a message and only engages with the sender if they are at risk of engaging in unintentional e-mail misuse.” This type of software can alert the user when the ‘send’ button is pressed by displaying any violations contained in the e-mail. It provides an opportunity for the user to stop the e-mail before it is sent and therefore, before it becomes a legal business record. “Integrating e-mail control software with presend intervention demonstrates a reasonable effort should an incident occur, making it an important component in ensuring legal compliance and corporate responsibility,” says Bradley. Further, implementing user self-review solutions promotes employee responsibility by allowing them to determine the appropriate course of action.

An underlying component of e-mail management is accessibility. This is largely driven by the FRCP, which requires an organization to produce any e-mail related to pending litigation within 99 days. For this reason, storing e-mail properly has become a prime consideration. Simple, ‘bulk’ storage of e-mail has several inherent flaws, not the least of which is the space that e-mails can consume in any storage environment. Many companies think that simply storing all e-mails can satisfy the legal requirements of the FRCP. What they will find, however, is that although they may have stored the e-mails, they have no efficient means by which to search them. Locating a specific set of e-mails would be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

OPT FOR ARCHIVE, NOT STORAGE
“Storage is a very broad term referencing the fact that data is being held. For example, e-mails can be stored on a user’s local hard drive, in a company’s e-mail server, or on tape backups,” says Matt Smith, president of LiveOffice. “However, none of these options is considered to be viable for long-term, tamper-proof storage, which is where archiving comes into play.” Archiving refers to more than just storing data. It requires data, in this case e-mail messages, to be copied or moved to a secondary location. This relieves the space burden of the company’s primary storage solution, enabling long-term storage of e-mail that can still be accessible at a later date.

“Effective archiving systems are disk-based and able to store extremely large amounts of e-mail for long periods of time, without the threat of the data being corrupted,” says Smith. “In addition, good archiving systems are backed up in multiple, geographically disparate locations, ensuring the availability of data at all times.”

Fortiva’s Goodwin goes on to explain the importance of archiving. “There is some confusion around this term [archiving] because it can be used to refer to everything from ad hoc end user ‘archiving’ to formal archiving for corporate purposes,” he explains. Common platforms, such as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, give users the option to "archive" e-mail by saving it as a PST (personal folder storage) file on their desktop computers. While this removes the data from primary storage on the Exchange server, leaving it accessible on the user’s computer does not qualify as active archiving. “An active archive [the definition used by most analysts] involves indexing  information, enforcing retention policies, and preventing deletion or alteration of e-mail until a predetermined disposition date,” continues Goodwin.

Most companies take one of two approaches to e-mail archiving: save all or save nothing. Both strategies have inherent flaws. “Saving all e-mails means that messages quickly add up and increase storage requirements — along with the number of useless e-mails that still must be recovered and analyzed during e-discovery. Meanwhile, saving nothing means companies will be unable to provide requested and necessary documentation when litigation occurs,” says Bradley. Arguably the best solution to this conundrum is e-mail archive categorization. This type of solution enables an organization to establish retention policies based on specified business rules. In the same manner as a user would establish document categorization through the use of keywords, an e-mail categorization tool will use keywords, position titles (such as CEO or manager), departments (like HR or accounting), and so on to categorize e-mails into the proper retention cycle. In this manner, a company can establish longer retention periods in an archive for regulated communications than those established for personal e-mails and insignificant correspondence.

OPT INTO HOSTED E-MAIL MANAGEMENT
“According to recent analyst reports, growth in hosted solutions overtook that of on-site e-mail archiving solutions in 2006, and we expect that trend to continue,” says Goodwin. “Both IDC and Gartner analysts have made similar predictions, and our experience certainly backs that up.” SaaS solutions can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively and eliminate the need for purchasing additional hardware or software to accomplish effective e-mail management. In addition, hosted e-mail management solutions can provide the redundancy of multiple data centers in geographically dispersed locations, addressing disaster recovery concerns while still removing the burden of monitoring and archiving e-mail from internal IT staff.

“Organizations with between 1 and 1,000 mailboxes are embracing hosted message management systems,” says Smith. “We are also seeing increased interest from larger enterprises.” Historically, these organizations have been hesitant to outsource their e-mail management, but with message volumes growing exponentially each year, CIOs and IT managers are beginning to turn to SaaS solutions as a cost-effective option for alleviating the resource-heavy administrative tasks associated with e-mail management.

Cost savings can be a big consideration, especially when you factor in the questionable stability of today’s economy. “If the United States heads into another recession, corporations will likely rein in information technology spending, and consequently, software companies will potentially suffer,” says Smith. “Vendors that offer SaaS solutions, however, will continue to thrive.” In fact, Gartner predicts that from 2007 to 2011, the overall growth rate of SaaS will double that of enterprise software as a whole. SaaS can help users meet their technology needs by supporting vital functions, such as e-mail management, at a fraction of the cost of running an in-house system. In addition, the fixed monthly expense of a SaaS solution helps users control overhead while also eliminating the need to carry nonrevenue-generating assets, such as in-house hardware or software.

While hosted solutions are a cost-saving and IT resource-saving option for enterprises, the impact can be even more beneficial for SMBs due to the lower cost per user. SaaS offerings enable SMBs to benefit from e-mail management features that have typically been implemented in-house by Fortune 500 companies with expansive IT budgets. Additionally, opting for SaaS-based e-mail management solutions can keep an organization, whether SMB or enterprise, consistently upgraded as these solutions evolve, without requiring significant out-of-pocket expenditures.

“Addressing e-mail management with messaging audit, presend e-mail controls, and categorization tools before it enters the archive can increase overall operational visibility and reduce risks created by e-mail. Additionally, companies can effectively adhere to new e-discovery requirements in a practical, affordable, and responsible manner,” says Bradley. As businesses continue to recognize the need for e-mail management, archiving solutions that support end user access will become commonplace. Hosted solutions will shift the burden off end users while continuing to protect  users from legal and business risks.   

Non-Profit Uses Fortiva to Help Improve Knowledge Transfer Among Employees and Volunteers

Posted by Praising Gaw, VP Marketing

Today, we formally announced that the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is using Fortiva to meet their archiving needs. LLS is the world's largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services. And thanks to a very forward-thinking VP of Technology and Infrastructure (Claude Edkins), it's also a leader in adopting technology to improve processes and make the organization more efficient (something that is somewhat unusual in a non-profit setting).

With over 1500 full-time employees plus 1000 part-time and volunteer workers working out of 103 locations, it's not surprising that LLS faced an email storage management issue. This - along with concerns about disaster recovery and e-discovery - led Edkins to look into email archiving as a solution. But what's really interesting about LLS is the way in which  Claude and his team saw the archive as a way to improve the way information is accessed and shared in the organization.

Like many non-profits, LLS deals with some turnover, particularly among volunteers. As a result, having an effective way to transfer knowledge from one individual to the next is very important. It's also important that employees can access email data on an as-needed basis. By giving their employees access to search their archive in real-time, LLS is using Fortiva as much more than a traditional archive - they're using it as an operational system to access important information on a daily basis. At the same time, they can place limits on how much data is stored on their email server and in PST files, reducing the burden on their storage without reducing access to data.   

There's no question that e-discovery, compliance and email storage management are the primary drivers for most businesses to implement email archiving. But it's great to see an organization with the insight to take advantage of the archive for much more.   

By the way, the full case study on LLS is available through the Fortiva website.

Litigation Hold Loopholes – Preventing End-User Deletion

Post by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

Last week, an interesting post appeared on StorageSoup, a SearchStorage.com blog that provides commentary on the storage industry. The post, titled FRCP looking like a PITW (Pain in the Wallet), identifies some of the potential loopholes a company can face trying to enforce a litigation hold. It also questions whether technology exists to address these loopholes without forcing an organization to literally keep every email indefinitely.

The quick answer to that question is yes (in fact that’s exactly what Fortiva’s on-demand email archive offers), but I thought it would be worthwhile to address some of the challenges mentioned in the blog entry in a bit more depth. Considering that the post was written by Tory Skyers, a Senior Systems Engineer who has hands-on experience dealing with multiple litigation holds and who regularly writes on storage issues, the confusion around how to best enforce a litigation hold is obviously hitting even the most seasoned IT professionals.

Here’s a quick rundown of Skyers’ main concerns, followed by my thoughts and recommendations:

1. Some trials last a loooooooong time, and the costs of storing the data requested for litigation hold on WORM are very significant. Despite this, the potential risks and costs of not having the data available can be so high that businesses can’t afford not to store relevant data once a litigation hold comes into affect.
   
   
   1. As Skyers mentions, some cases can last five years or more and the cost of storing this data starts adding up quickly. The whole process can also be time-consuming for IT, and there are no guarantees that data won’t be corrupted. So not only is this approach expensive, it’s risky too. Having said that, the risks of not storing the data can be even higher. The key is to find a more cost-effective, reliable way to store the data (ie. an email archive).
2. There’s a “Safe Harbor” clause in the FRCP that absolves companies of responsibility if the company has — and strictly follows — a deletion and retention policy. This protects the company from falling afoul of the regulation, but does my act (as an end user) of deleting an email fall under the “Safe Harbor” clause?
   
   
   1. The quick answer is no. The “Safe Harbor” clause protects organizations from being penalized for deleting relevant information before a litigation hold comes into affect, assuming the data was deleted according to a stated deletion and retention policy. If an end user is allowed to delete an email (accidentally or intentionally) that is covered by a litigation hold, or that has not yet reached the corporate retention period, it can be considered spoliation of data.
      
      Spoliation is the withholding, hiding, or destruction of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding and is a criminal act in the United States. It can result in fines and/or incarceration for the parties who engaged in the spoliation. It can also lead to a negative inference ruling that can ultimately lead to a guilt verdict.
      
      To avoid this, companies should have technology in place to ensure that email data cannot be deleted by an end-user until both of the following criteria are met: a) it has reached its retention period and b) it is not covered by a litigation hold.
3. I’ve seen some precedent that leads me to believe that simply having and following a policy is not enough… So as it relates to e-discovery, if a company allows [me] to delete my own emails, are [they] implicitly approving of me disobeying retention and deletion policy?
   
   
   1. In a way, yes. The key to meeting the FRCP guidelines is having and enforcing a policy. If you believe your end-users can be relied on to accurately enforce your policy (and not make any errors), then it is sufficient to simply have a policy and rely on your employees. Otherwise, you better have some technology in place that enforces your policy (including litigation holds) and prevents human error.
      
      In fact, a case in point is the recent Intel vs AMD lawsuit. Intel executives were informed of the litigation hold retention requirement, but many of them deleted email anyway. Regardless of whether the email deletion was intentional (or whether it was simply human error), the company was guilty of spoliation.
4. It seems like I would have to have CDP in place and store every email entering and leaving every mailbox forever to be really covered against every contingency.
   
   
   1. Fortunately, it’s not that bad. Once an email reaches the lifecycle outlined in the corporate retention policy, it can (and should) be deleted (assuming it’s not covered by a litigation hold). There is absolutely no need to keep everything forever (in fact that would raise a company’s risk profile significantly).
      
      The question is, how should you store your email? Skyers accurately points out that relying on a backup process may be insufficient, since any data that is sent or received, and deleted in between backup periods may not be retained. Beyond that, it is virtually impossible to apply a consistent retention policy against data on backups, since a single tape necessarily contains emails crossing a wide span of time. Backup tapes also have a high rate of corruption/failure, making them an unreliable.
      
      To keep all the data that enters your corporate email system for as long as necessary (and no longer), you really need an email archive like Fortiva, which captures every email that is sent or received, and keeps multiple copies in unalterable format on spinning disk until they meet the retention policy.

So all this leads to one conclusion –an email archive is really the most foolproof way to avoid the many possible loopholes when dealing with the FRCP requirements for email retention, litigation holds and e-discovery. At the risk of being self-promotional, here’s a run-down of how Fortiva meets all the requirements and addresses the concerns raised by Skyers:

• Cost-effective storage: Fortiva’s SmartStore archive stores a redundant copy of every email sent and received according to the customer’s retention policy in a centralized location. It requires virtually no effort on the part of IT, and it starts at just $1.10 per user, per month for 1000-user company. It also offers storage management features that allow a company to significantly reduce the burden on the Exchange email server.
• Litigation hold: Fortiva allows legal or IT to enforce a litigation hold against relevant email indefinitely with a click of a button in a web-browser interface.
• Policy enforcement: Fortiva allows you to develop granular policies (including different retention policies for different departments, individuals, and types of data), and automatically enforces those policies.
• Redundant storage: Fortiva stores multiple copies of every email in unalterable format on spinning disk, and keeps an additional copy in a secondary location. The system also provides continuous data validation across all archived data.

It’s important to note that not all email archives offer the same functionality. There is a whole class of email archives that were designed primarily to address email storage management issues, and those typically allow end-user deletion/deletion outside the retention policy (introducing many of the problems highlighted above). But that gets into topic in itself. In my next post, I’ll explain the different types of email archive, and the situations that each type is best suited for.

A Challenge to All Email Archiving Vendors (Part 6 in a Series on Search)

Posted by Chris Tebo, CTO

Over the past few weeks, Rick and I have spent a good deal of time discussing the benefits of real-time search as well as the challenges of delivering it. To end our "Series on Search", the most important point we want to make is a very simple one .an email archive must offer consistent, timely search results to be effective. Customers should demand this and vendors, be it in-house or SaaS, should make hard commitments to deliver it.

Whether it's being used by the legal department to execute pre-discovery or discovery searches, or end-users to search for their own email, search performance expectations must be met and maintained. At Fortiva we take this very seriously.  We commit to a search performance SLA in our contracts with customers.  We monitor our infrastructure every day to ensure that we're living up to this guarantee, and we deploy infrastructure as needed to ensure we continue to live up to it.

So, to all the email archiving vendors out there - I challenge you to do the same, and provide a search time guarantee.  For managed and SaaS vendors, this is a pretty straight-forward challenge. In-house vendors, on the other hand, will be hard-pressed to do so. Why?  Because it is as much about the hardware the solution is deployed on as it is the software, and the software vendors don't have the ability to ensure that the hardware is appropriate. But they can provide open and clear guidelines on how much hardware is required to maintain search performance, particularly as the archive grows.

To those of you who are considering an email archive, or are creating an archiving RFP, make sure you should have clear expectations for search response times before you begin. Ask potential vendors what they will commit to, and hold them to it. If they won't make a commitment, you probably want to ask yourself why not.

How We Keep Email Archiving Costs Low

Posted by Jeremy Hope, VP Operations

As Rick's blog entry from January 28 noted, Fortiva recently introduced an entry-level archiving solution (SmartStore) that is extremely price-competitive. To help people better understand how this is possible, I thought I’d explain the unique storage challenges that email archiving presents, and how we at Fortiva deal with those challenges in a way that allows us to keep costs low.

The majority of companies implement high performance, highly redundant, high priced storage for their transaction-based applications and slower performing, less redundant, lower cost storage for larger amounts of data within file based applications.  The challenge with archived data is that it requires storage with both characteristics, crossing the typical boundaries of storage solutions typically implemented within most IT environments. 

Archive data necessitates storage with high throughput, not only to be able to write the large amounts of data within a reasonable time, but also to allow for the searching of the data.  High redundancy within the archive data storage environment is expected since in most cases only one copy of the data will exist (making tape copies of hundreds of TBs of data is impractical).   Meanwhile the same characteristic, the sheer quantity of data, begs for less expensive storage to stay economical.

This leaves many IT Managers puzzled with how to provide an archive solution at a practical price with reasonable performance.    One solution is the use of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution like Fortiva, where you let the provider worry about the storage environment.  Still, many may wonder how providers such as Fortiva can provide lower cost per TB solutions (such as our recently announced SmartStore solution) without losing money due to the storage costs alone.

For Fortiva, the solution lies in a grid computing infrastructure that utilizes a large number of 1 or 2U servers with locally attached RAID disk arrays.   This hardware provides for a fast, highly redundant and scalable storage infrastructure.  This storage environment mixed with the Fortiva “secret sauce” – a proprietary Distributed File System at the application layer that tracks where data is within the grid of distributed servers – allows Fortiva to provide multiple redundant copies of data at an extremely low cost.  Another advantage of the solution is the consolidated computing power available by utilizing each CPU within the grid that is used for providing search and other application functionality.

The fact that Fortiva uses a grid environment for all clients distributed throughout a data center provides the economies of scale that no large enterprises can afford to implement themselves – a fact that is reflected in the low pricing Fortiva offers.