Policy, like politics, is local, but one universal truth is that determining which data qualifies as a record means close collaboration among IT, legal and business stakeholders. We discuss policy, including e-discovery and unified message archiving, in greater depth in "Don't Get Burned," at nwc.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193003540.
Getting an ILM project rolling is a financial investment as well. File-classification software could easily set an average enterprise back $50,000 to $100,000. Managing 12 TB of data with our Editor's Choice would run $80,000. E-mail archiving costs $10 to $50 per mailbox. But there are offsetting savings. You'll be using less--and less expensive--storage because you're keeping fewer copies of low-value data. Productivity gains can be realized by reducing backup and restore windows and speeding up e-mail servers and databases by removing inactive data. Then there's being able to satisfy e-discovery requests in days without recalling tapes and putting a pair of admins on tape monkey duty for a month.
Mail On The Fore
Corporate America has come closest to achieving the ILM dream through e-mail archiving products, like EMC's EmailXtender, Symantec's Enterprise Vault and Zantaz's EAS, that migrate e-mail messages out of the primary data store based on age. Messages are placed in a secondary data store, where they're semitransparently available to users, then deleted as dictated by the organization's data-retention policy.
While we now think of e-mail archiving primarily as a tool for ensuring compliance with data-retention regulations and providing the ability to index e-mail messages and allow searches across multiple mailboxes for e-discovery, the systems were originally marketed as tools to make the e-mail administrator's life easier. Because restoring even a single message to an Exchange server long required restoring the entire information store or making incredibly slow mailbox-by-mailbox backups, admins had a strong motivation to limit the size of their information stores. But imposing user mailbox quotas led to the proliferation of user .PST files, inappropriate deletion of messages--and an extremely inadvisable shift of data management to individual users, who are apt to keep amusing off-color jokes but delete communications that might qualify as business records.
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