Originating Author: Peter Burris
The business value of an email archive will flow from two sources: (1) reduced exposure to legal fines and damages and (2) derivative mining of knowledge embedded in electronic correspondences. As a system for reducing risk, an email archive will behave like any other archive system: write activity will be nearly certain, records will be managed using highly mature practices, and reads will be rare and limited in scope. Consequently, the practices of administering an email archive will be easily aligned with traditional archive administration, and likely handled by infrastructure personnel. However, as a critical source of data to a dynamic set of extremely valuable search, analysis, and prediction systems, an email archive will behave more like a content management system: writes still will be nearly certain, but access to records will be extremely fluid. Traditional archive administration practices (and technologies) cannot be applied to an email archive under these more dynamic conditions. Indeed, administrative practices are likely to be more aligned with database management administration than archive administration. While storage professionals will be intimately involved in the processes of architecting and implementing an email archive system, their role in administration likely will be reduced to writing and achieving specific – and potentially very high profile – infrastructure service-level agreements for email archive administrators that are more aligned with application management groups.
Action Item: Action Item: The hybrid nature of an email archive will strain traditional storage administration approaches to archive management. To appropriately manage an email archive, storage professionals should work to establish an administrative regime similar to that found in the database world, making sure to forge administrative rules that do not compromise the fundamental requirement that email archive data be legally verifiable.
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