As I work with companies to evaluate how to leverage archiving, email is top of mind. Many go on to research, choose and implement an email archiving and journaling solution. They enable the ediscovery functionality, and their legal counsels are using the tools.
No doubt, email archiving provides a number of compelling benefits, including active movement of messages off the mail server and into the archive and a reduction of storage requirements on those servers. Beyond these, the journaling functionality now assures that 100-percent of messages sent and received are captured and stored in the journal archive. And, the legal team now has the ability to perform cost-effective, efficient discovery on this data.
This is great. But, archiving can, and should, be taken a step further. How about expanding the archiving environment to include additional data types? What about the most common data type to address – Windows file shares? Imagine if we create a single rule that archived all files that have not been accessed in two years or more. That typically results in a storage reduction on file servers of 70-percent or more. As a result, tier 1 file system storage is reduced by 70-percent. And, backup and recovery times on the file servers are reduced as well. Beyond those benefits, every file that was archived is now indexed and discoverable by the same tool the attorneys are using to perform discovery on mail data.
Let’s not stop there, what about your SharePoint sites? What about instant messaging traffic? Do you have any social media that needs to be archived, indexed, and discoverable? A single archiving solution with the necessary licensed options and features can simply be expanded to address much more than just email.