Ticking Time Bomb

Email volumes globally have increased substantially in the

past few years. A BusinessWeek study in 2002 revealed that corporate users

received an average of 20 -30 incoming mails a day and this was estimated to

grow by as much as 80% by the end of 2003. Two years later, this volume has gone

up significantly. According to industry experts, email volumes currently stand

at 56.3 bn per day as opposed to just 9 bn per day in 1999. This number is

expected to shoot up to 163.4 bn per day by 2007-that's nearly three times

increase in the next two years.

A recent Osterman research conducted in association with

EMC/Legato in the US revealed that 38% of the organizations have experienced

more than 50% growth in email volumes. In addition, while 55% of the

organizations saw their email storage requirements rise in excess of 50%, 10% of

the organization saw email storage requirements grow by more than 200%. The

situation would not be too different in the Indian corporate world.

Business and the enterprise have undergone a complete change

in the last few years, thanks to the email. Electronic mail boxes store the

majority of critical intellectual property regardless of the size of the

company. Says Arun Rao, head of data-center and storage, Datacraft,

"Enterprises need to ensure that they adhere to strict regulations that

affect every facet of email communication."

The Challenge



A large number of enterprises have global ambitions today, which makes
regulatory compliance as one of the biggest business drivers in deploying email

management solutions. An email management strategy could help organizations

avoid legal and regulatory liabilities. Today, a significant part of company

information and records exist in digital format that involves both online and

offline storage. Section 404 of the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Act 2002, requires an

unprecedented level of alignment between IT practices and business practices;

between technology management and financial management and between record

management practices (retention, storage, access, and disposal) and compliance

requirements.

Says SR Balasubramanian, VP, information systems, Hero Honda,

"Though we have a fixed size for the individual mail boxes, this

restriction has been withdrawn for key users over the years. This has resulted

in the increase of mail box sizes to over 150 MB in some cases." Adds

Arindam Bose, head of IT at LG, "Email archival and security are our key

concerns."

The other problem is of mails in a decentralized environment

where mails reside on desktops. Says EMC's PK Gupta, director, strategic

development, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Korea, EMC Software Group, "Having

decentralized mails is risky as the organization does not have any control over

local PST (in MS Exchange) and NSF (Lotus Notes) files (personal folders) where

email is a business record and is valid in many countries as a legal

record." Migration of local PST files is also difficult. However, there are

solutions available in the market that search for local PST and NSF files.

Getting the Strategy Right



Storage is the single-largest challenge for enterprises today. Says Jim

Simon, director of marketing, APAC, Quantum, "While some companies save

only a few weeks of email, a huge number save mails for years or

indefinitely." Given the huge capacity required, one should address key

issues while formulating an email management strategy. For example, if there is

a need for an email retention policy; what is the speed at which one needs to

find and retrieve mails, what is the cost involved in legal support if required,

how can I ensure the authenticity of the mail, how can I ensure email security,

and routine backup and archival. This will help determine how much storage the

company would like to allocate to email management. Says Gupta of EMC,

"Taking care of key questions like these helps one to formulate the right

storage strategy in addition to adhering to compliance requirements wherever

relevant."

Archiving Enterprise Mails



Today, multinationals and a significant number of Indian companies are being

subject to regulatory compliance. Enterprises are aware of the fact that the law

mandates the archival of all email communication for a stipulated period of

time. Says Praveen Sahai, marketing manager, South Asia, StorageTek,

"Having a good email archival system that has well-defined rules and

retention policies based on business value and legal compliance can virtually

eradicate the cost of legal problems if the company was to be audited."

Archiving should be an important aspect of the company's

email management strategy.

Say Rao of Datacraft, "Traditional archival mechanisms

are not capable of handling high volumes of data." Such mechanisms are very

slow and involve a high amount of manual management activities. This increases

total cost of ownership and chances of manual errors are very high.

A commonly used method of archival is tape-based. Typically,

tape-based archival requires that the archived tape media be located, mounted,

and then processed for recovery of data and email. Historically, tapes are the

least expensive mediums for storage and industry analysts rate tapes with a

shelf life of up to 30 years very highly. Another mechanism that works well is a

hybrid model, where email backup takes place on hard disks for several weeks and

then permanently archived to a tape.

However, with continuous innovation on the archival front,

newer archival mechanisms available in the market today use faster hard disks

like ATA and SATA or S-ATA (Serial ATA), an evolution of the Parallel ATA

physical storage interface. Serial ATA is a serial link-a single cable with a

minimum of four wires creates a point-to-point connection between devices.

Transfer rates for Serial ATA begin at 150 MBps and SATA II 300MBps. One of the

main design advantages of Serial ATA is that the thinner serial cables

facilitate more efficient airflow inside a form factor and also allow for

smaller chassis designs.

Newer products and solutions based on technologies like

Content Addressed Storage (CAS) are fast emerging today to address issues like

robotic arm failures, access times, technology obsolescence, and scalability

limitations.

A combination of all the above mechanisms could help devise

an optimal archival strategy. For example, keep all the email on primary storage

for a month, then move it to ATA- or SATA-based cheaper disks for a year but

leave shortcuts so that users can retrieve these mails themselves.

Email Management and the Indian Enterprise



The trend towards devising a strategy for effective email management is

catching up in India. Says Hero Honda's Balasubramanian, "Email management

is now viewed as a key to good corporate governance and as a tool to manage the

company's code of conduct." The trend is fast picking up in sectors like

BFSI and telecom as well as multinational corporations and large corporate

houses across different sectors.

There are technologies and solutions in the market that can

be used to address typical problems associated with emails in both centralized

and decentralized environments. However, awareness needs to be created, which

should be backed with adequate training. Strategizing email management has taken

off in India and that is heartening for the future of the Indian enterprise.

Sums up EMC's Gupta, "I see an increasing number of Indian enterprises

formulating policies for effective email management and going in for email

server consolidation in the next couple of years."

Bhaswati Chakravorty