Email Archiving

[pantscat]

Hello all,

 

I've recently brought the subject of Data Protection up here and SMT have suddenly realised it's not just an IT issue...

 

Anyway - as part of this review I'd like to look into Email Archiving.

 

At this moment in time we're creating our data retention policies and I think having a proper enterprise email archiving system will help no end - at present we've got the situation whereby users who are reaching their mailbox quota are simply dumping a lot of email into PST files. This is a bit of a historical issue... it's always been the way it's done - but it's not an efficient use of storage and it's also dangerous from a DPA point of view.

 

So - does anyone here use any particular email archiving system? If so... would you recommend it? How much did it cost you?

 

I've already looked into Symantec Enterprise Vault - but the costs are pretty high for the number of email users we'll want to cover (270-ish).

 

Cheers!

[GrumbleDook]

Also remember that under FoI any electronic communications / documents you have may be requested. If you are using an archiving solution it should be one where it is easy enough for you to be able to gain access to the relevant emails in a timely fashion. A number of schools have had their wrists slapped by the ICO for failing to respond in time to FoI requests and one excuse used by some has been the time it has taken to find the information (including emails).

[pantscat]

Absolutely - that's just one reason for doing this.

 

It's just not a valid excuse to shrug your shoulders and say it takes a long time...

[pantscat]

Bumpity bump... does anyone use any mail archiving at all!?

[GrumbleDook]

The question has come up a number of times before and very few people seemed to have an answer. Anyone using LA / RBC provided services tended to say that little was available, and most others relied on backups if they needed to get something back.

 

To some extent it is actually easier to have policies in place which state what types of content needs to be retained and these are done as .eml in given folders, in the same way you would save a word document.

[pantscat]

Ahh - ok. Thanks @GrumbleDook.

[Michael]

With Live@Edu, mailbox sizes are 10GB and Office 365 are 25GB by default. There's also the option to have unlimited mailbox sizes on Office 365 E3 Enterprise

 

Quote:

An Exchange Online (Plan 2) user receives 25 GB of storage in the primary mailbox, plus unlimited storage in the personal archive. For Exchange Online (Plan 2) users, a default quota of 100 GB is set on the personal archive, which will generally accommodate reasonable use, including the import of one user’s historical email. In the unlikely event that a user reaches this quota, a call to Office 365 support is required. Administrators cannot adjust this quota upward or downward.

[pantscat]

Thanks @Michael - I've already had a quick look at Office 365 but my undertstanding of the retention period is that we wouldn't get much of a historical "backup" should a user delete something.

[Michael]

Isn't that a risk with any e-mail system in the world?

 

I'm guessing you're using an internal Exchange system which is good, but it's limited compared to cloud Exchange solutions when talking about mailbox sizes.

 

How much do you think you need out of curiosity to archive 200+ users worth of e-mail?

[pantscat]

Yes, but with my on-site Exchange I know that I've got sufficient retention.

 

I agree completely - I'll never be able to offer the same storage allocation for my users as a cloud-based solution can.

 

That's a good question! At the moment I've not yet calculated how much of our storage is being eaten up by PST files. I'd imagine though that each user would happily eat up 5GB or more without any trouble. But... if we had an archiving system that implement de-duplication or single-instance storage then I suspect this figure would be a lot lower - even more so if it was compressed too.

[Michael]

You can customise e-mail deletion retention policies as described here up to 5 years. I think that should cater for your needs surely?

 

Office 365 is moving to Exchange 2013 soon, so I suspect even more settings will be customisable under Powershell.

[sukh]

I wouldn't use symantec, too pricey & doesn work well. So I think you need to look into the amount of data you expect & look into capacity. There is a differencr between archiving & journaling so make sure you know what you need. You can start with PA & thrn maybe move into the cloud.

[Soulfish]

What you really want to look at is archiving with built in legal discovery/hold options to help with FoI discovery etc. I know that Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange has an addon archiving option if you run onsite Exchange.

[Dave_O]

Dell's Appasure or Veaam's Exchange addin

[sarahsmith]

If you are concerned about the size of mailbox then you can reduce their size by compressing method. For this you can use any good compact PST software as it can help in managing the size of PST files. This blog post has defined this compacting concept here MS Outlook Troubleshooting Tips and Tools: Manage Outlook PST file with Compact PST Software

 

Regards

sarah

[pantscat]

You can customise e-mail deletion retention policies as described here up to 5 years. .

 

Oddly enough, after I very confidently stated that O-365 wouldn't be sufficient, I started to look into the retention policies and I see that this might actually be a decent option... plus I could always run it in Hybrid mode...

 

I know that Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange has an addon archiving option if you run onsite Exchange.

 

That's quite interesting - we're using FOPE, but I hadn't noticed that!

 

If you are concerned about the size of mailbox then you can reduce their size by compressing method.

 

Thanks Sarah - that's an interesting link.

[sukh]

You can't compress your personal archive if you're using Exch or 0365, the data is in a mailbox not a PST. Personally I wouldn't use PST files as there's more risk of data loss/corruption.