IT Executives Remain Resistant to Email Archiving Demands

Despite regulations and high profile court cases, some IT professionals are still not taking email archiving needs seriously, according to a recent survey from Proofpoint, Inc., provider of unified email security, archiving and data loss prevention solutions.

The September 2008 survey (conducted by Osterman Research, Inc. on behalf of Proofpoint, Inc.) of 130 IT managers and executives who manage an average of 17,000 email users, found that:

• Nearly 60% of respondents do not have an email archiving solution in place and 15% do not have plans to deploy one.
• More than one in three (39%) companies surveyed had been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the past 12 months alone.
• Previous Osterman research (April 2008) has found that nearly two-thirds of organizations have been ordered to produce employee email or instant messages at some point, while a slightly higher percentage have referred back to email archives or backups to support their innocence in a legal case.

"It is shocking to see such a high percentage of enterprises that have not yet deployed an archiving solution and even more troubling to see that some have no plans for deployment. Recent legal cases, including the one involving Larry Ellison and Oracle, should be reason enough to make sure a solution is in place to meet e-discovery demands," said Sandra Vaughan, senior vice president of marketing and products for Proofpoint. "Unfortunately, it will take more cases and lost time and money before some organizations realize that they are putting themselves at serious risk by not adopting a technology solution to help preserve email records and produce email in a timely manner."

On September 4, San Francisco US District Judge Susan Illston ruled that Oracle deliberately destroyed or withheld emails and other material for Chief Executive Larry Ellison that should have been turned over to lawyers for shareholders during a lawsuit. According to Illston’s ruling, Ellison and Oracle had a duty to preserve his emails after the suit was filed in March 2001 and many missing emails were from after that date.

When an organization expects to be the target of legal action, it is obligated to stop destruction of all documents and records that may pertain to the upcoming litigation. According to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (the US rules that govern court procedures for civil suits) these records include email messages and attachments.

When such legal actions are pending, companies should enforce a ‘litigation hold.’ This is the process used by companies to advise their employees of pending or anticipated litigation and ensure that relevant records are not destroyed. Failure to preserve documents for a litigation hold can have very negative consequences during a trial, as in the recent Oracle case. Despite these requirements—and the potential negative consequences of failing to meet them—the majority of companies surveyed by Proofpoint have not yet implemented technology to prevent such destruction of records.

"In this day and age, it is critical that organizations of all sizes have a well thought out email archiving policy and solution in place," said Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, Inc. "In addition to legal discovery and litigation benefits, companies can improve storage capabilities and gain valuable visibility into messaging data. The latest trend is on-demand archiving solutions that companies can deploy in minutes and significantly save on up-front hardware and internal IT resourcing costs."

Based on the recent survey findings, Proofpoint put together five common myths and realities surrounding email archiving:

Myth 1: Archiving is too expensive for my organization
Reality 1: New deployment models, such as on-demand, make email archiving solutions affordable for companies of all sizes.

Myth 2: My organization is too small for anyone to care about our emails
Reality 2: Any company with a messaging system in place can be asked to provide messages during litigation. Proofpoint’s survey found that employee email had been subpoenaed at 15% of companies with 500 or fewer employees in the last 12 months.

Myth 3: It won’t take me long to search for emails
Reality 3: Research shows that archiving solutions can dramatically speed searches compared to searching backups. Osterman’s April 2008 study of message archiving trends found that it takes a median of eight person-hours and two days of elapsed time to satisfy a single data retrieval request from backups, compared to just 30 minutes for an organization that has an archiving solution in place.

Myth 4: I can just add new data storage servers when I need to
Reality 4: The size of email messages and attachments continue to increase and more emails users make it expensive to add more servers. According to Osterman Research, messaging storage has grown by nearly 30% during the past year alone. Storage requirements for email are actually growing faster than email use itself, primarily because there is greater use of attachments in email including large multimedia files.

Myth 5: I trust that employees will only save files and messages to our internal servers
Reality 5: "Local message stores can create a nightmare for organizations that do not have a centralized archiving system in place," says Osterman. "If local stores must be searched in response to an ediscovery order, for example, IT will typically invest an enormous amount of time and resources to finding all of the relevant content, assuming that they even have access to all of this information."

The situation is further complicated by the fact that most users of email in the workplace also check their work-related email at home, which means that large amounts of corporate information may be stored in employees’ homes, making the discovery process impossible in some cases. Proofpoint is the email security, archiving, encryption and data loss prevention solution of choice for a rapidly growing number of enterprises, universities and government organizations worldwide, helping them stop spam, protect against email viruses, comply with regulations that govern email use and retention and prevent leaks of confidential information via email and other network protocols.

Proofpoint Email Archiving is an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use SaaS hybrid email archiving solution for the e-discovery, regulatory compliance and email storage management challenges faced by today’s enterprises.