Email Archiving and Managing Emails as Business Documents

I subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds and eNewsletters many of which talk about email archiving. Over the years I have seen countless whitepapers, articles, and blog entries about this subject, about how email is the electronic version of the corporate letterhead, about the fact that the information and knowledge contained within our emails are the front lines of our information assets and our early warning system for troubles.

No wonder why we have seen in the last 10 years a new space pop up, the email archiving space. How did we get here and where is this thing going?

A brief history…

Most organisations agree with the notion that their email systems and infrastructure have a mission critical status. The incredible usefulness and effectiveness of email have led to its universal adoption as THE primary business communication tool.

In the late 90’s, the use of emails had already reached explosive levels and organisations’ email servers were starting to experience bloating-related reliability and availability problems, causing great anxiety within IT.

In order to alleviate this problem, IT began to impose restrictive quota limits on the size of user mailboxes. This measure proved to be temporary because it forced users to move emails out of the servers and park them into local PST files – this led to the scattering of this critical asset content and made it so much hard to discover and reuse.

The first generation of email archiving solutions tried to address this particular problem. They focused on moving excess emails from user mailboxes to centrally controlled archives, leaving behind links (emails stubs) that allow users to access the archived emails from within the email clients.

By the beginning of this decade, a wave of second generation email archiving products emerged. These products addressed the emerging need to capture emails in real time to satisfy an increasingly strict regulatory compliance landscape (example SEC 17a-4). These email archiving products captured emails directly from the “Journal” where copies of emails are sent before users receive them into their mailboxes.

Around that same period, email systems (and backups) were starting to become targets for opposing legal teams in investigations and litigation. The well-publicized Zubulake versus UBS Warburg legal case led to the 2006 amendments of the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedures which tightened the discovery process. The email archiving products were at that point enhanced to facilitate the discovery search in support of this requirement.

Managing Email as Business Documents

Up to this point, email archiving products were focused on satisfying the IT, Compliance and Legal stakeholders. But they were not addressing the fact that email is fundamentally an electronic version of the venerable company letterhead (paper).

In other words, the business wants emails to be managed as a business document (and possibly as a corporate record). A few years ago, the Global Records Manager of a large US Federal Government Agency stated that that 90% of their new records are emails! And that these “records” must be managed along the same principles and policies as other records. Put it differently, more and more organisations view emails and documents as technologically different but from a business point of view they must be treated the same way.

RSD’s Email Archiving Offering

This is how RSD continues to evolve its email archiving offering, using a single infrastructure to manage all archived content, be it mainframe generated AFP reports, documents created by end users of scanned in data capture centres, and emails captured from email servers.

In particular, this is a key advantage to our existing clients who have already invested in building scalable and reliable archives and simply want to add email archiving to that same archive rather than have to build a totally separate infrastructure.

I believe that the age of email archiving solutions is starting to give way to the age of archiving solutions that do emails as well as other content forms and formats within a single infrastructure.

Bassam ZARKOUT
Technical Advisory Committee Member