Re: Email Archiving/Enterprise Information Archiving

[Ken Connelly <Ken.Connelly () UNI EDU>]

If you're an Exchange shop, I believe that Symantec has a product,
Vault, to help with this.  I don't think it could be classified as
"cheap" though.  I'm not a vendor, nor a (Vault) customer, but I'm aware
of the product.  YMMV.

- ken

Jesse Thompson wrote:
> I don't think that you are wrong, but there is a strong head wind.
>
> It costs less to store all messages indefinitely than it costs to have
> each employee spend the time cleaning and organizing their mailboxes.
> Then consider the administrative cost involved with coercing/reminding
> staff into cleaning mailboxes.  Then there is the cost in recovering
> important purged messages that were not saved due to [insert reason
> here].  Multiply this by thousands of employees, and e-discovery
> lawyers start to look cheap.
>
> Costs aside.  People are just plain lazy, or they are pack rats.  I'm
> one of them.  Didn't someone prove that the people with the messiest
> desks are the most productive?  Is it too far of a stretch to reason
> that a clean-email policy might make your organization less productive?
>
> Perhaps your idea might work if there was an intermediate stage where
> mail was automagically moved to a place where the messages were still
> easily accessible (and recoverable by the employee) for an extended
> period of time before they are purged.  Although, I'm not sure if this
> would solve your e-discovery woes.
>
> Jesse Thompson (an email admin)
> University of Wisconsin-Madison
>
> On 07/21/2010 04:27 PM, Clifford Collins wrote:
> > We are in the midst of sorting out what to do with e-mail and other
> > sensitive documents in terms of data retention and destruction. I am
> > interested in knowing why you permit folks to keep e-mail indefinitely.
> > It sounds like an e-discovery nightmare and mis-application of e-mail.
> >
> > Let me give you my context. If you were still dealing with U.S. postal
> > mail then would people be leaving the original correspondence folded
> > back in their envelopes, stored in cartons with labels like "vendors" or
> > "personal" on them, sitting on their desk? Probably not. They would file
> > them in folders in a personal or deprtmental filing cabinet (you
> > remember the rows of filing cabinets) or just throw them away (or maybe
> > shred them). As the filing cabinets begin to bulge with documents the
> > staff would periodically be forced to clean them out (perhaps according
> > to some retention policy).
> >
> > Because we allow the bad habit of not saving important correspondence in
> > a folder on our departmental share where it belongs but, instead, leave
> > it in a folder in our e-mail, our mail system has become our personal
> > and departmental filing cabinet. After all, it is too easy to just leave
> > it there instead of putting it where the department can find it! And
> > thus e-mail accounts bloat with stuff that doesn't get purged. And when
> > we reach our storage quota (the filing cabinets are full) we beg for
> > more space because disks are cheap! And our legal counsel gets
> > heartburn!
> >
> > Wouldn't it be better to require people to save important documents to
> > the departmental or personal share they are assigned and automagically
> > expunge all messages that are more than six months old? That way, people
> > are forced to decide whether to keep it. Otherwise, it will be trashed
> > according to the University's retention and destruction schedule. Also,
> > the departmental data steward has to periodically review what is in the
> > departmental share and expunge useless or expired information that might
> > violate that same policy and possibly become fodder for an e-discovery.
> > No different from clearing out old stuff from the physical filing
> > cabinets.
> >
> > Sorry for the flow of consciousness. We had a close brush with
> > e-discovery a while back and woke up to the cost of diverting our IT
> > department to the arduous task of restoring EVERYTHING from years back
> > and finding every message that pertained to the subject of the
> > litigation. Big $$$$$$!! and stopping everything else in IT for several
> > weeks or even months! We began to question whether backups should be
> > "ooops protection" for the careless staff member or should exist for
> > disaster recovery only and merely go back two major backup sets (fulls
> > and incrementals). This way staff are responsible for taking the
> > "correspondence" they receive out of the "envelope" (the e-mail system)
> > and filing it in the appropriate "filing cabinet" (shared drive). The
> > shares get backed up regularly and can be restored if something
> > important got deleted but would involve the data steward (and a little
> > bit of grief for the user) as it should. Going back to the USPS analogy,
> > imagine the look you would get from your postal carrier if you asked him
> > to give you a backup copy of a letter he delivered two days ago! Why do
> > we expect this of our e-mail services? And think of the savings in
> > backups!
> >
> > I don't know. Am I making any sense? We've allowed people to embrace the
> > wrong analogy with the way they use e-mail. It is a message delivery
> > mechanism and not a document storage mechanism (despite the tools they
> > find in the mail software). We need to retrain folks to file important
> > stuff in the right place and not leave "boxes of mail" in their opened
> > envelopes sitting around on our desks (perhaps a poor analogy) waiting
> > for one to accidentally slide into the trash or worse, get discovered by
> > a litigant's lawyer who relishes e-mail pack rats.
> >
> > If I am wrong then somebody set me straight or put me out of my misery!
> >
> > Clifford A. Collins
> > Information Security Officer
> > Franklin University
> > 201 South Grant Avenue
> > Columbus, Ohio 43215
> > "Security is a process, not a product"
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Patrick Feehan" <Patrick.Feehan () MONTGOMERYCOLLEGE EDU>
> > To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 4:22:52 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> > Subject: [SECURITY] Email Archiving/Enterprise Information Archiving
> >
> > We are in the process of evaluating an e-mail archiving solution for
> > Montgomery College. Our initial reason to consider e-mail archiving was
> > to meet the storage challenge and email retention issues. We use
> > Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access.
> >
> > We note, in the process, that Gartner is retiring the E-Mail Active
> > Archiving Magic Quadrant and replacing it with a new Magic Quadrant for
> > Enterprise Information Archiving. Is the concept of email archiving as a
> > siloed activity already past its prime?
> >
> > Have any of your schools using Exchange implemented an e-mail archiving
> > solution? If so, did you look for a tool that goes beyond e-mail to
> > assist with e-discovery, legal holds, SharePoint files, electronic
> > information archiving, records management policies, etc? If yes, which
> > features/capabilities did you decide were important?
> >
> > Was ability to grow into enterprise information archiving important
> > to you?
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any thoughts you can offer.
> >
> > */Patrick J. Feehan JD, CIPP
> > /*Director of IT Privacy & Cybersecurity Compliance
> > Montgomery College
> > (240) 567-3087
> > patrick.feehan () montgomerycollege edu
> > <mailto:Patrick.Feehan () montgomerycollege edu>

-- 
- Ken
=================================================================
Ken Connelly             Associate Director, Security and Systems
ITS Network Services                  University of Northern Iowa
email: Ken.Connelly () uni edu   p: (319) 273-5850 f: (319) 273-7373