EAS Archiving

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Recently The Quill Consultancy signed an exclusive rights agreement to sell the Exchange Archive Solution (EAS) in Tasmania.

As reported in our last newsletter businesses are facing increasing risk from poor or non-existent record management of electronic data. This is particularly important with today’s use of e-mail as a key form of business to business communication.

As technology and businesses have evolved IT infrastructures have become more and more complicated, distributed and difficult to manage. This can lead to applications, becoming unavailable and data loss. These disruptions occur despite an ever-increasing spending in an attempt to keep this bloated environment functioning. Yet more than ever before, businesses need access to their applications and data 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Today Microsoft Exchange is far more than just a messaging service. Outlook has become a central portal for managing users’ daily working life, meaning that behind the scenes the Exchange servers have become the default data store for maintaining and sharing a myriad of essential communication, documents and information.

As e-commerce continues to grow, younger staff will only ever have worked in this type of environment and your organisation will continue to become more and more dependent upon e-mail. The data residing on the servers will continue to grow and limiting users’ data stores is even more likely to lead to problems as crucial documents are deleted to solve an immediate issue without fully contemplating the long term implications.

The explosion of e-mail as a business communication tool delivers significant benefits in convenience, speed, efficiency, quality, and geographical flexibility. Users appreciate that e-mail is non-intrusive, compact to store, offers cost savings and has high security potential. But all too many users are discovering – in the face of unprecedented growth – that e-mail can become a double edged sword without a comprehensive strategic plan for its management.

E-mail growth has become exponential, as is the reliance that most businesses have on it. As well as underpinning business communication most organisations recognise the intellectual property located in their mail stores as well as the legal implications of email. The ability to effectively manage, search and retrieve this data and provide the assurance that it will not be lost "no matter what" is therefore essential.

One cannot overstate the importance of having an e-mail retention policy. First and foremost, such a policy must comply with archive and records legislation by ensuring that all e-mail pertaining to the business of an organisation is retained, stored and organised, in an accessible manner and/or destroyed as appropriate. Secondly, the policy must not impede on the daily production of e-mail users.

In organisations faced with hyper-growth of their e-mail stores and excessive time taken for back-up or restoration a common reaction is to issue directives restricting the use of e-mail. Taken in desperation and focused on solving an IT problem, such decisions can inhibit internal and external communication, disrupt creativity and productivity, disadvantages users in the face of legal challenges and jeopardise the primary source of intellectual capital within a corporate entity.

The Exchange Archive Solution (EAS) allows an organisation to offer a versatile and affordable software resolution to the e-mail storage dilemma without imposing on the daily activities and privacy of users. It allows every member of an organisation to make the most of their system’s capability with confidence that the rules governing its operation are fully transparent. For employees, it offers a reasonable expectation of confidentiality; for employers, a complete and accurate corporate memory including total security with respect to user access and solid back up in the event of system failure.

Based on comprehensive archiving and retention policies, using EAS messages and their attachments are migrated from the front-line Exchange servers to an open-ended SQL or Oracle database for long-term document storage.

The business requirements behind deploying Exchange archiving differ from organisation to organisation, however this document highlights many of the common factors that often occur.

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These are:

• Reduces Administrative Overhead
• Effective Use of Data Stores
• Eradication of Personal Store PST Files
• Enhanced End User Efficiency
• Protecting the Organisation
• Legal Retention
• Easier Upgrade of Exchange
• Designed to leverage Consolidated Storage

EAS eliminates many of the day to day administrative tasks associated with Exchange. These include:

• Exchange itself is arguably not an effective long-term mail store and retrieval system and lacks key functionality. This can has lead to massive mail stores that are difficult to manage and whilst disk may be relatively cheap, the Exchange server itself will become less efficient and reliable than a streamlined server.
• Implementing an effective EAS policy will enable the message stores to be shrunk and then maintained at near constant size. Since retrieval of the archived data is so simple for the user, aggressive archiving policies can be implemented enabling very small and easily managed message stores on the Exchange servers. Since e-mails do not need to be restored to the servers when being accessed from the archived, the message stores stay small.
• Although Exchange attempts to reduce storage by holding single copies of attachments when multiple deliveries occur, this is flawed when data is copied across multiple Exchange databases or output to PST files. The EAS archive references all e-mails across multiple Exchange servers, sites, or migrated PST files into one archive database that re-establishes single instance storage.

• For many administrators .pst files can be a nightmare. Apart from the difficulty of management, particularily when the user decide to store them locally, there are other issues including data corruption when they become large.

• Highly paid individuals can spend much time simply managing their e-mail. The process of filing and archiving data manually can be time consuming, all the more so when the filing system fails and the individual spends hours looking for that crucial e-mail. Failure to manage the e-mail can result in mailbox limits being reached and this will often trigger a lock out meaning that a user can not send any further e-mails until the mail store is reduced in size.

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