Depending on the industry and the typical damage periods (i.e. Anti-Trust where the damage period can go back 10-15 years on averge) most of the data needed for responding to legal discovery will reside on tape.  So if you’ve recently implemented an archival strategy for capturing e-mails, where you can use the system for legal discovery, you may still need to deal with tape restores for quite some time, years even.

It’s prudent to consider tape restoration to the archive as part of your implementation and strategy upfront.

About the picture. PowderHorn 9310 tape library

The cost for tape restoration can usually be high and typically involve third parties other than your archival vendor to deal with the factory style logistics needed for managing 100’s or maybe 1000’s of tapes.  The key need however resides within the archive tier and it’s ability at the component layer to handle lower level e-mail formats such as internet standard RFC822, EML, DXML, etc. basically as many formats as possible, so that the avenues for re-ingestion are flexible.  What’s more important however is the ability to separate or mark the data that is coming from tape, as such. Perhaps, keeping more than just a virtual store makes the most sense.

E-Mail archival has taking several twists and turns over the last few years.

The primary one is the use of the archive for legal discovery, sometimes referred to as eDiscovery.

This has left many vendors flat footed and the reasons are in fact quite simple.

Number one, the same product that you, if your a commerical software company,contruct for archiving and stubbing / the process of removing the e-mails from the mail server store, and relocating the physical bits to an archive server, and creating a link so that the end-user can seamlessly retrieve the bits from the archive server instead of the e-mail server.

That solution value proposition is simple and strong.

When we are going down the road of e-mail archiving for regulatory reasons is there a thing as 100% complete, or is 5 - 9’s accuracy good enough?

What is the consequence for correct and complete as it relates to data archival systems deployed for compliance, legal discovery and ultimately corporate risk management.

If you are challenged with the requirement for capturing all electronic communications (inbound/outbound) what mechanism, process or IT controls can help you to achieve 100% accuracy or better put - can guarantee both complete and correct results? Even in the best case scenario can you ever really account for technology outages, software bugs (that can occur at every layer below the application, firmware for example on a hardware device), or even good old fashion human error. Although the vision of an archival system gives you the impression that you are dealing with a very static durable almost simple piece of technology that houses long-term data - nothing could be further from the truth.

To delete or not to delete, this now appears to be one of the holy grails of the e-mail archival industry, and it’s extending beyond regulated industries. On the surface, you would think that the regulatory industry is the best suited for deleting e-mails as the regulations are very specific for how long particular e-mails have to be kept. What more could you ask for, you have it in black in white, from the government in a loud booming voice "thou shall keep the Equity traders e-mails for a period of 5 years, thou shall only delete it after the prescribed period has come and gone".

So what’s the issue with deleting that e-mail on it’s 5 year anniversary date? With today’s systems you can schedule the deletion for the exact second it reaches it’s 5 year anniversary.   So again, what’s the big deal, well let’s take a look at look at it from the opposite perspective.