Summary from Wikibon's 3/6/2007 Storage Research Meeting
Moderator: Peter Burris
Analysts: David Floyer
The discovery by the legal community that email archives present a new vein for business has led to a large number of law suits in which old emails become the key piece of evidence used to convict corporations of wrongdoing. As a consequence of this simple change, email archiving capabilities should no longer be focused on narrow IT interests (e.g. keeping the costs of storing emails low) and are now much more in the domain of the business, specifically the legal function within the business.
Lawyers view email archives as absolutely essential to proper business operations. Email archiving has become a mission critical application. As a result, the technologies that are being utilized for successful email archiving systems are no longer focused narrowly on reducing the cost of writing email to an archive structure but rather at extracting and querying email that is necessary to support a low cost and hopefully (from the business perspective) successful discovery process.
The drivers behind this are both the need to better support the legal activities of defending the corporation as well as the requirements associated with staying in compliance with increasingly information-orientated regulations. However, this process of moving the perspective of email archiving from the IT server room to the court room will further evolve. The capabilities associated with being able to query, extract and rapidly make sense of large amounts of unstructured data will find themselves increasingly in the board room as companies attempt to consider issues proactively like verifying business practices or testing whether or not employee management activities are conducive to the cultural edicts of the corporation.
Over the next few years, we’ll see significant new case law test the limits and requirements of email archiving and that will continue to drive significant new investment in these technologies. We will also start seeing businesses further experiment with the capabilities created by email archiving in other business domains.
Action item: IT must facilitate the transition to a legal business driven email archiving approach, recognizing that approach itself will evolve to increased focus on access to unstructured data for business query. However IT organizations must also help the business fully factor, in a more comprehensive way, how messaging technology affects business risk and opportunity by addressing new email technologies (e.g. hosted email) as well as other messaging technologies (e.g. instant messaging and voice mail) that employees utilize to perform both business and personal communications today.
