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Managing an e-mail Repository
As more and more business critical data is exchanged electronically, e-mail archival has become one of the most crucial tasks before an IT manager. Here, we provide a few solutions to ease the pain
Saurangshu Kanunjna
Friday, September 07, 2007
Today each enterprise, irrespective of its size, deals with thousands of
e-mail on a daily basis. Most of these -mail contain essential business critical
information and data. The huge explosion of e-mail messages has prompted many
enterprises, to look beyond e-mail back-ups. A prime reason for the popularity
of e-mail archival applications is the explosion of email messages as well as
concerns about regulatory compliance and associated threats. Irrespective of
size and stature, each enterprise is subjected to have legal data retention
requirements. Most of the legal data is exchanged via e-mail. So, it becomes
essential to archive these business critical mails in such a manner that they
can be put forward within a stipulated period of time and without much fuss,
should a need arise. Failure to comply with such requests can lead to huge
losses for an enterprise.
Benefits
E-mail archival helps organizations index, store and retrieve critical
e-mail and important file attachments in an automated manner. It records the
details and content of each mail sent or received by an organization in a
tamper-proof and auditable manner.
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E-mail archival solutions help improve the performance of the e-mail server
by off-loading content from the production server. Archiving also helps users to
get access to business critical mails irrespective of their age. It eliminates
the need to create risky .PST/.NSF files and enforce consistent e-mail policies.
Archiving also ensures more free space and hence lower storage cost. One of the
main driving force toward archival of e-mails is compliance with statutory
regulations, as organizations need to provide access to regulators when asked to
do so. Another important factor is litigation support. In the traditional e-mail
archival system, where information is spread across several systems within an
organization, it becomes difficult to provide e-mails in support of litigation.
Some of the compliance regulations generally met by most e-mail archiving
solutions are: Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002: Security and Exchange Commission (SEC);
HiPAA; and NASD.
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Best practices in
e-mail archival |
Following are some of the best
practices that will reduce some implementation, maintenance and archiving
concerns:
- Optimizing
the archiving database: When e-mail
archiving applications archive e-mail in a database, some of the tables of
database require regular maintenance. They need to be serviced on a
regular basis, as the table size might go beyond a threshold which will
effect the performance of the archiving application. For this, you need to
set the appropriate safety overhead and ensure that the suspect table can
trigger a threshold alarm.
- Single data
store: You should have a single instance
store for archived file structure 'coz that's where actual data is stored.
Since a large scale enterprise uses multiple servers, the archiving
application is likely be able to run on these servers. So it's preferable
to archive and index written data in a single instance store.
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High-availability of archiving application:
Many enterprises use high-availability technique to keep their exchange
environment operational. An archiving application may also require similar
availability. Some kind of automated failover capability should be
included in the archiving product to avoid any operational overhead.
- Automated
load balancing: Load balancing is a
critical requirement as multiple archiving servers support multiple
exchange servers. Always look for this technique either through
traditional middleware or within the archiving application, as manual load
balancing is time consuming.
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Restructuring Index: Even under best
environments, an index can get corrupted. When the corrupted index points
to thousands of e-mail entities, a rebuild is very difficult. Some of the
key issues to consider are, whether rebuild is transparent to users,
whether exchanged operation is compromised, and also once index is
rebuilt, do exchange or the archiving applications need a reboot.
- Reporting
and metrics: Managing the archive is not
an easy task. A comprehensive metrics component helps effectively
administer the archiving environment.
- Backing up
archived data: Two or three copies of
archived data can be backed up till the media refresh threshold is
achieved. An archiving application must allow backup of the top tier
regularly, in the storage tier hierarchy. So the old archived e-mail moved
down the storage tier, and the top ones, are backed up on a regular basis.
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In-house or hosted
There are primarily two methods through which an enterprise can store and
manage archived e-mail. You can either have the functionality developed in-house
or use an off-site service, commonly referred to as 3rd party service. Most of
the large-scale enterprises prefer to have the functionality in-house, primarily
due to security concerns. They prefer to host the server themselves and manage
data completely within their own facilities. Hosting the facility in-house has
its own advantages in terms of accessibility, reliability and security, but
requires a heavy investment. Small-scale enterprises can make do by getting the
services hosted offsite. Here, an enterprise would just need to have a VPN
connection with the offsite service provider, and would not require to buy
software or additional servers. So, even though their IT team would manage the
archival of mails but they would be hosted on an external server.
GFI MailArchiver
This is an easy to use and powerful email archiving solution. Using GFI
MailArchiver you can archive internal and external e-mails to a central archive
store, which can be maintained via a Web-based configuration. Its working
functionality is very simple--GIF MailArchiver connects to the configured mail
server, collects all e-mail stored in the mailbox and archives them to the
active database configured. It requires both SQL Server 2000 (Service Pack 3)
and SQL Server 2005 along with Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange Server 2007.
Implementation of GFI
The solution is simple to implement and use. After installation you need to
start GFI MailArchiver configuration in your Explorer. First, you need to
configure the location where you want to archive e-mails and whether you want to
exclude someone from the archiving process; which archive store you want to
store archived emails, etc. For these settings, go to the Configuration node,
under which you'll find various configuration modules. Users can define the
archiving option based on direction, such as inbound mail, outbound mail, and
internal mail. You can define whether you want to exclude some users or archive
e-mail of all users. You need to also mention the archive store where all
archived e-mail will reside. You can attach a GFI MailArchiver 3 database via
the archive store wizard. First give the name of the archive store, as this
helps you to manage the archive store and helps users of your network to select
the correct archive store to browse and search. Select the Microsoft SQL Server,
where GFI MailArchiver 3 database is stored, from the Microsoft SQL Server box.
Next, select the authentication method you want to use, be it Windows
Authentication or Microsoft SQL Server Authentication. For SQL Server
Authentication, you need to provide the user id and login details, whereas
Windows Authentication will show the credentials of the account displayed in
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