By Michael R. Brown, EMEA Pre-Sales Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division

Ever wonder what is meant when people speak of “real archiving”?  What is that exactly?  Simply put, it is using policies and rules to determine what content should get kept — archived — where it should be stored and for how long.  A proper archive is also online and enables users to get to the content through some intelligent search mechanism.  This differs dramatically from just putting content away on some box.  This “box” also might be on line, but lacks any intelligence to what should be kept; in most cases, everything is kept and most likely much longer than need be.  There is no intelligence behind what is stored; the latter isn’t really archiving, it is long-term retention.  Don’t get me wrong, long-term retention is good and very necessary, but it isn’t an archive.

Applying intelligence and having rules to discern what is worth archiving and what is not, is especially important for email.  For all the talk about email not being fast enough for today’s business and that mediums like chat, twitter, and SMS are replacing it, there is no such substantiating evidence — just ask your favorite mail administrator.  Email is and will be the main business communication vehicle for some time to come.  The sheer magnitude of email demands archiving as means by which to maintain mail server health and performance, cost control and SLAs to end user communities.  Further, if compliance and eDiscovery are issues, consider this: in most cases 85% of the content relevant in an eDiscovery case comes from email!  How does an organization efficiently execute eDiscovery without an archive?  All that said, what are the benefits of archiving email and how does one go about defining and setting the date retention policies determining what gets archived?

Over the next couple of weeks, I will detail some major benefits of archiving email with EMC SourceOne. Stay Tuned!

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