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Disaster Recovery Sunday, March 12 - 2006 at 10:01 (GMT+4)

Addressing the challenges of email management

As every IT professional knows, the volume of email passing through servers shows no sign of diminishing.
It's no surprise, then, that proactive organizations are taking steps to reduce storage costs, simplify management, enable instant search and discovery of email, and generally better manage email to ensure its security and availability. This article looks at email management challenges in detail, and then offers advice on streamlining email infrastructure management.

The quota system

When a corporation needs to manage email, what does it typically do? Generally, it will impose email quotas, restricting users to a limited amount of email storage. However, this tends to shift the problem rather than resolve it. Users must constantly ensure that their email storage is below the quota and store their excess messages in separate files (for example, PST files on Microsoft Exchange). In many cases, these files are kept on the network file servers and so continue to use storage and backup resources. In general, email quotas affect user productivity, result in large numbers of support calls, and are one of the burdens of email management.

Regulations are driving expanding retention periods

There are also growing email challenges related to regulatory compliance. Expanding records retention periods create additional challenges to ensuring the security and availability of this information-a common driver across regulations. The more there is to manage, the more challenges and risks are associated with ensuring the security and availability of this information. Moreover, retention periods vary from regulation to regulation. Without controls in place, there is no way to classify this information upfront and determine the appropriate retention period.

Explosive growth
Compounding all these issues is the explosive growth of email in all businesses. According to The Radicati Group, the average user now sends 10MB of mail per day. And that doesn't take into account the dramatic rise of instant messaging (IM) in the enterprise. With email systems tightly monitored, unmanaged public IM networks are becoming a preferred medium for employees to send personal and sometimes inappropriate messages. The Radicati Group estimates that 85% of all enterprises have public instant messaging in use, but that only 12% of them have an enterprise solution for securing and managing IM.

Legal implications
The emergence of email as legal evidence is also pressing companies to demonstrate that their data is not only secure from tampering, but also that specific information is quickly retrievable to support the legal discovery process. Simple record retention alone is insufficient to meet the standards for accessibility. The traditional way to restore required messages from backup tapes is a cost-prohibitive and time-consuming process. Manual tape restoration costs $2,000 to $5,000 per tape, resulting in total charges in typical litigation cases exceeding $200,000 per case. The widely publicized Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories Inc. case illustrates how the legal-discovery
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process tests the way many companies manage email and other documents. Wyeth and its sister company, A.H. Robins Inc., were sued over the weight-loss drug combination fen-phen. Although the plaintiff sought relevant email messages from only a few of the defendant's employees, the company's tape backup system couldn't easily isolate the required information without incurring considerable cost, estimated to be between $1.1 million and $1.7 million. Faced with the cost of email discovery, and the possibility of losing despite such an effort, Wyeth settled with the plaintiff. The bottom line is that enterprises are seeing increasing requirements for the supervision, retention, and discovery of electronic information as a result of new regulations and from the fact that email is used as a legal document in litigation. This adds cost and complexity to managing the lifecycle of email.

Email security and availability

Symantec believes that approaching the demands placed upon the email infrastructure as a single, multifaceted challenge rather than a series of isolated challenges points the way toward a comprehensive solution. This integrated approach to email security and availability works as follows: * Risk and data reduction. Enterprises must reduce the amount of unwanted email at the earliest point, even before it enters the network. That means filtering messages and blocking spam, viruses, worms, and other malicious content at the SMTP gateway level to make sure that messages are clean and secure before they get stored on the messaging server. This applies to both inbound and outbound traffic. * Internal email protection. To protect from internal threats, a security solution is needed on the messaging system. This will scan the message store for malicious content and prevent propagation internally. Outgoing email should be monitored for viruses and for confidential, inappropriate, and oversized content, to prevent this data from being sent through the internal mail system. * Records retention. Messages need to be archived, based on business policies. Message archiving solutions allow organizations to provide users with a large mailbox while controlling storage usage on the primary messaging servers. Archiving systems let administrators automatically migrate email messages and attachments to a secondary, less-expensive storage location; automatically expire or delete messages, or migrate to a third tier of storage; compress the information and implement single-instance storage, to reduce the volume of information while leveraging disk or tape storage for archived data; and provide instant search and retrieval of content by users. Equal in importance to assuring the security and availability of email information is building the email infrastructure on a resilient foundation. Storage virtualization and clustering software together enable the highest levels of availability and scalability by allowing the addition of systems and storage, and by identifying and utilizing existing unused resources. This maximizes the contributions of all the server and storage components of the email environment. Symantec Email Security and Availability for Microsoft Exchange helps organizations ensure the security, availability, and resilience of email systems and information, while reducing the total cost of maintenance of the email infrastructure. The solution takes a multi-layered approach to email security, incorporating antivirus, antispam, archiving, backup and recovery, and storage management capabilities.

Conclusion
Exponentially increasing volumes of email, greater reliance on email as a primary business application, and escalating costs associated with management of the email infrastructure are all driving the growing imperative for a comprehensive, integrated email management solution. IT professionals are striving to respond to the need for longer retention periods for email data, AME Info URL: http://www.ameinfo.com/80095.html

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and for high availability and accessibility of email data. The bottom line is that email systems need to be secure to reduce the risks posed by diverse threats.

Disclaimer
Any opinions, advice, statements, offers or other information expressed in this article posted on the AME Info Web site are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of AME Info FZ LLC. AME Info FZ LLC is not responsible or liable for the content, accuracy or reliability of any material, advice, opinion or statement in this article. Articles posted on AME Info are automatically distributed to global news providers like Bloomberg, Financial Times, KnightRidder, LexisNexis and Reuters among others as well as indexed by major news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo! and Newsnow for additional exposure. AME Info FZ LLC - PO Box 502100, Dubai Media City, Phase II, Building 4, Office 204-205 - United Arab Emirates Phone: +971(4)3902700 - Facsimile: +971(4)3908015 - press@ameinfo.com - http://www.ameinfo.com

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