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Email is the holder and medium of so much information that nobody likes deleting old messages. Many people use their email system as a personal filing cabinet. Text-only emails do not use much storage but problems start with attachments.
Most companies impose quotas that limit how much storage each associate can use for emails. Without these quotas, server disk drives would overflow and email systems would come crashing down. But they have an unwelcome side effect: users create their own email archives using PST files.
Private, local PST files and personal email archives create a number of problems for businesses that allow them:
- Attachment multiplication. Imagine you send a 1MB PowerPoint presentation to ten colleagues and they all move that email into their own PST file. Now there is 10MB of duplicated data.
- Bloated backups. If each of those PST files is stored on a company file server and it gets backed up every day and the IT department keeps ten days’ worth of backup tapes, the original attachment is now consuming 100MB of backup storage.
- Slow, inefficient backups. Instead of backing up a single 1MB file, the IT department has to backup 10MB a day for ten days. This takes more time and money: the more data there is to backup the more tape is required. Ultimately, backup bloat demands more expensive backup devices.
- Broken backup windows. Most companies backup overnight but, if backup sets grow too big, there is a risk the backup may not be completed in time, or that it might overrun, slowing down normal IT operations during the working day. Round-the-clock or global operations make it even more important to complete backups quickly.
Security risks
The uncontrolled proliferation of PST files poses risks for businesses beyond the IT department.
- Organizational amnesia. Every email that disappears into the black hole of PST files takes a piece of the company’s knowledge with it. If the PST file’s owner leaves the company, there is a risk that the information in the PST file will never be brought back under company control.
- No oversight. Information in PSTs does not get stored and disposed of according to consistent company policies. This can give lawyers headaches.
- Legal liabilities. If a company needs to keep a formal archive of emails sent and received to comply with regulations, PST files represent a gap in the record. An email stored in a properly managed email server can be a vital defense in a lawsuit, but how do you know what’s on 1,000 different ad hoc PST files? Even without a legal dimension, the inability to locate a critical email quickly could be commercially disastrous.
- Laptop loss. A PST file stored on a laptop is unlikely to be encrypted. So, if the laptop was lost or stolen, a thief would have ready access to the email stored on it. This might include information that is covered by the Data Protection Act and other regulations. For example, In February 2007, the BBC reported that the Financial Services Authority fined the Nationwide Business Society £980,000* because of the theft of an employee’s laptop containing customer information.
The MessageLabs Archiving Service
The MessageLabs Archiving Service stores users’ attachments in a secure, offsite data center. It replaces attachments with an HTML link to the file in MessageLabs offsite archive. This is a process called “attachment stubbing.” Users still have access to the attachments by simply clicking on the link, but they no longer use up their storage quota. In turn, this eliminates the main reason that users create PST files. Once archiving is in place, the IT department can prevent the creation of new PST files and help users migrate data in existing PST files to the new archive.
The MessageLabs Archiving Service can also archive emails themselves, creating a well managed, encrypted, searchable database of every company email. Companies can set policies about what is archived and who can access the archive.
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