Three articles caught my eye today that I really wanted to comment on...
eDiscovery
First, there is an article from Baseline Magazine on how to prepare for an eDiscovery showdown. There were a couple of things that I paid attention to in the article. The first is that CIOs are not sure of how much a legal discovery request could really cost them. They might have a great storage plan but the data might be stored in legacy systems or stored in off site locations that could be expensive to locate and retrieve. Imagine if that legacy system that was used for the email storage no longer existed as a standard and could not be recreated to restore the data. Information might not only be costly to retrieve but in some cases impossible. This is why a centralized archive is so important. Everything is stored in one place in non-proprietary formats that allow fast retrieval.
The other interesting item in this article is where it mentions that CIOs might be responsible for storing VOIP data or voicemails that result from VOIP calls. This is very interesting. Imagine the conversations you have using VOIP being recorded, archived, and (through voice recognition) searched.
Here is the link: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Storage/Preparing-for-an-EDiscovery-Showdown/
Quotas
IDM Online posted results of a survey that polled coporate email users and showed that 65% of the respondents had quotas in place that limited the size of their mailbox forcing them to manage their email storage. Of those, 66% managed their mailbox in a way to retain mail using means outside the email system including home email accounts or pst files.
Imagine the risk that companies are exposing themselves to because of mailbox quotas. I really do believe that the need for archiving is shifiting more towards compliance in the future and away from storage management. Although this survey shows me that the move has not happened yet and the need to control mailbox sizes seamlessly without having the users resort to pst files is still great.
Here is the link: http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=9724
Hosting
Last but not least Byte and Switch posted an article describing how the hosted archiving and discovery market is growing. It is interesting to see how many vendors there are in the hosted archive market. It is not as many as in-house vendors but there are still a lot of vendors for that market segment. I only have one observation about this.
If email is moving toward SAAS and is hosted offsite and the archive for that email is hosted offsite as well then no email data is stored in-house at all. Aren't companies exposing themselves to risk by not maintaining a copy of their data in-house? What happens if they pick a vendor that is not in it for the long haul and closes up shop? What happens if they want to migrate to another hosted email service and still need access to the legacy data? It is my opinion that an in-house archiving solution provide companies with a safe place to keep data that is platform agnostic. If they ever decide to change email services then access to their legacy data is maintained.
Here is the link: http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=158102&WT.svl=news1_1
Technorati Tags:
Email Archiving, Compliance, eDiscovery, Hosting, Quotas, VOIP, SAAS, Storage, pst files
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