E-Mail Archiving Poised For GrowthE-Mail Archiving Poised For Growth

The increasingly pressure-packed regulatory environment that's been evolving has created a growing focus on records retention, especially E-mail. Laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and emerging requirements from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have companies in a host of vertical industries scrambling to get E-mail archiving systems in place.

That means a fast-growing market for technologies that make that possible, according to research firm the Radicati Group, which released research Thursday indicating that spending on E-mail archiving technologies and services will grow to nearly $1.5 billion by 2007 from $164 million this year.

Radicati shared the numbers during a conference call in which a panel of archiving vendors stressed that archiving is heading toward convergence of content types, with more companies starting to look at systems that will combine E-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, and document records into one searchable collection.

That's the case for the city of Oceanside, Calif., which has been using archiving technology from KVS Inc. to create on-demand access to E-mail records but is seeing a need to archive other types of communication and documentation. CIO Michael Sherwood said during the teleconference panel discussion that he'll put more thought into policies around the archiving of additional content formats before deploying any additional technologies. Companies that jump into archiving need to recognize the importance of policies that dictate how those archives will be used, he added.

For instance, Sherwood said that after the city went live with its KVS E-mail archive, the IT staff immediately was inundated with requests from employees who had accidentally deleted the messages in their in-boxes and wanted to have those messages restored using the archive. Sherwood quickly put the kibosh on that by setting policy that the archive couldn't be used for such purposes--not because the system isn't capable of that, but because the IT staff simply doesn't have the time to handle such tasks. "People were expecting us to run a whole new job," he said.

As companies look to deploy archiving systems that can handle E-mail as well as other types of content and that can adapt to emerging regulatory requirements or shifts in archiving policies and procedures, the vendor panel had a number of recommendations for those shopping for archiving technologies:

Find something with a lot of flexibility to handle different content types and one that can survive if you decide to change E-mail platforms. "If you have a solution that can change without having to buy new technology or throw out the technology you've already bought, that's key," said Gustavo Nader, solutions marketing manager at Sun Microsystems.

Look for diverse searching capabilities. The chief requirement of an archiving system should be the ability to find any messages related to a particular topic, and it's the search function that ultimately determines the success with which particular messages are located.

Ensure that the product has a policy engine that can be easily adapted to changing circumstances. As Oceanside's Sherwood can attest, not having up-to-date policies that address every possible contingency can lead to problems.

Make it a priority to establish clear audit trails that can be marked and reported so that regulators can quickly and easily get what they need from you.

Choose a system that can allow for a variety of archiving variances--such as messages sent by and to ex-employees, employees who've changed their names, employees who have multiple addresses.