Controlling the flood: a look at email storage and management challenges - Automated Storage Management

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 2002 by Bill Tolson

Because email has moved beyond convenience and into the role of a strategic communication tool, it's increasingly coming under scrutiny in criminal investigations and legal proceedings. "Email has become the place where everybody loves to look," said Irwin Schwartz, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in a recent Associated Press article.

"It's like the gift that keeps on giving," said Tom Greene in the same article. Greene, who is a deputy attorney general in California, added, "People are so chatty in email."

And therein lies a problem. Noted Attorney William Savarino, "Email played a central role in the recent inquiry by the New York state attorney general into conflicts of interest at Merrill Lynch." The attorney general was able to assemble his case with volumes of emails in which analysts privately derided particular Internet stocks as "such a piece of crap" and "a piece of junk" while, at the same time, publicly giving the companies positive stock ratings, explained Savarino. He is from the firm Cohen Mohr, which specializes in representing automated data processing (ADP) and high-technology hardware and service companies in federal procurement matters, including related civil and criminal litigation.

No wonder Savarino recommends that companies adopt a company-wide email management system that addresses the technical demands of email and also "defines the appropriate uses of the company email system and monitors employee usage."

Save What You Must

Employee chattiness isn't the only aspect of email that leaves corporations legally vulnerable. "There are numerous federal, state and local statutes and regulations that mandate the retention of documents-including electronic documents and email-for prescribed periods of time," Savarino said.

He points Out that some record retention requirements, such as tax and employment records, apply to all businesses, but there are business- or industry-specific record-keeping rules, too. For instance, government contractors, under some conditions, must keep all records relating to a project for three years. So must broker-dealers regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Act.

And even if you don't need to save an email, if it contains business-critical information, you probably should. Right now, industry analysts at IDC estimate that 60% of business-critical information is stored within corporate messaging systems, up from 33% in 1999. "Because of the wealth of information contained on company email systems, they have become a prime target of discovery in litigation," Savarino remarked.

And, he warned, "Unless a business has a system in place to manage the organization and storage of email, the cost to respond to discovery directed at emails can be exorbitant."

A case in point is Rowe Entertainment Inc. vs. The William Morris Agency Inc. In this trial, the court required the defendants to conduct a review of their emails for privileged and confidential information before producing them for a discovery request, even though those reviews were projected to take two years and cost $120,000 for one defendant and $250,000 for the other. According to the court, the defendants' failure to separate and organize email into confidential and non-confidential was like leaving confidential paper documents unshredded and mingled with other, discoverable papers.

The lesson to take away from that court ruling is this: Make sure your email management strategy and system allow for organization of emails into accessible categories for retrieval by subject matter and confidential status. It pays to ensure timely deletion of unnecessary files, as well.

Power to the People?

Plenty of companies have a quick and easy solution to the challenge of organizing emails: Make the end-users do it. That's both a legally unwise course of action and a costly policy that sucks up time, resources and effort on the part of users and IT professionals alike.

At my company, StorageTek, we used to require users who got those "please delete" messages from IT to actively clean out their mailboxes, a process that included archiving email to personal archives (.pst) that some employees moved to the network drives for safe-keeping. Creating .psts increases the storage requirement on the networks drives because it creates several copies of the same email. By the end of 2001, we estimated that 38% of the company's data on network drives consisted of .pst files. At 15 cents per megabyte of managed network storage, storing and backing up that data cost the company approximately $120,000 more than if the data had been pushed off to tape archives or left on the email system.

And even with network drive archives, users still accidentally lost some of the files they needed. The company s email administrator was spending nearly 20% of his time retrieving and restoring messages users had misplaced or deleted. That's not uncommon. Consider these findings:

* More than 80% of end-users cannot retrieve messages from their personal archives without the help of the IT department.