Controlling the flood: a look at email storage and management challenges. (Automated Storage Management).

Because email has moved beyond convenience and into the role of a strategic communication tool, it's increasingly coming under scrutiny in criminal investigations and legal proceedings. "Email has become the place where everybody loves to look," said Irwin Schwartz, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in a recent Associated Press article.

"It's like the gift that keeps on giving," said Tom Greene in the same article. Greene, who is a deputy attorney general in California, added, "People are so chatty in email."

And therein lies a problem. Noted Attorney William Savarino, "Email played a central role in the recent inquiry by the New York state attorney general into conflicts of interest at Merrill Lynch." The attorney general was able to assemble his case with volumes of emails in which analysts privately derided particular Internet stocks as "such a piece of crap" and "a piece of junk" while, at the same time, publicly giving the companies positive stock ratings, explained Savarino. He is from the firm Cohen Mohr, which specializes in representing automated data processing (ADP) and high-technology hardware and service companies in federal procurement matters, including related civil and criminal litigation.

No wonder Savarino recommends that companies adopt a company-wide email management system that addresses the technical demands of email and also "defines the appropriate uses of the company email system and monitors employee usage."

Save What You Must

Employee chattiness isn't the only aspect of email that leaves corporations legally vulnerable. "There are numerous federal, state and local statutes and regulations that mandate the retention of documents-including electronic documents and email-for prescribed periods of time," Savarino said.

He points Out that some record retention requirements, such as tax and employment records, apply to all businesses, but there are business- or industry-specific record-keeping rules, too. For instance, government contractors, under some conditions, must keep all records relating to a project for three years. So must broker-dealers regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Act.

And even if you don't need to save an email, if it contains business-critical information, you probably should. Right now, industry analysts at IDC estimate that 60% of business-critical information is stored within corporate messaging systems, up from 33% in 1999. "Because of the wealth of information contained on company email systems, they have become a prime target of discovery in litigation," Savarino remarked.

And, he warned, "Unless a business has a system in place to manage the organization and storage of email, the cost to respond to discovery directed at emails can be exorbitant."

A case in point is Rowe Entertainment Inc. vs. The William Morris Agency Inc. In this trial, the court required the defendants to conduct a review of their emails for privileged and confidential information before producing them for a discovery request, even though those reviews were projected to take two years and cost $120,000 for one defendant and $250,000 for the other. According to the court, the defendants' failure to separate and organize email into confidential and non-confidential was like leaving confidential paper documents unshredded and mingled with other, discoverable papers.

The lesson to take away from that court ruling is this: Make sure your email management strategy and system allow for organization of emails into accessible categories for retrieval by subject matter and confidential status. It pays to ensure timely deletion of unnecessary files, as well.

Power to the People?

Plenty of companies have a quick and easy solution to the challenge of organizing emails: Make the end-users do it. That's both a legally unwise course of action and a costly policy that sucks up time, resources and effort on the part of users and IT professionals alike.

At my company, StorageTek, we used to require users who got those "please delete" messages from IT to actively clean out their mailboxes, a process that included archiving email to personal archives (.pst) that some employees moved to the network drives for safe-keeping. Creating .psts increases the storage requirement on the networks drives because it creates several copies of the same email. By the end of 2001, we estimated that 38% of the company's data on network drives consisted of .pst files. At 15 cents per megabyte of managed network storage, storing and backing up that data cost the company approximately $120,000 more than if the data had been pushed off to tape archives or left on the email system.

And even with network drive archives, users still accidentally lost some of the files they needed. The company s email administrator was spending nearly 20% of his time retrieving and restoring messages users had misplaced or deleted. That's not uncommon. Consider these findings:

* More than 80% of end-users cannot retrieve messages from their personal archives without the help of the IT department.

* The average IT administrator spends up to six hours per week recovering old messages.

* For email messages over a year old, it can take an email administrator up to 11 hours to recover the message.

* IT administrators spend as much as 20% of their time backing up email systems.

Users also spend significant time managing email boxes. On average, users spend 12 minutes looking for each "lost" or archived message and two-to-three hours per week managing emailboxes to comply with company deletion and retention requirements.

When StorageTek tried to quantify the cost of email management without an email management system, we factored in average salaries and time lost to users and found our estimated productivity loss in dollars was $2,013 per employee per year. Multiply that by the 3,270 employees we have at corporate headquarters, and the annual cost to the company topped 350,000 personnel hours or about $6.5 million in lost productivity.

To address that loss, we instituted our own Email Xcelerator solution, which provides a suite of software and hardware to manage Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino email systems more efficiently. We anticipate that Email Xcelerator will slash email-related productivity losses by 90% within a year. Data storage costs will decrease, as well.

A Deluge on the Way

Being a technology company where almost every employee relies heavily on email, StorageTek may be ahead of the crowd in our need to face e-mail challenges. But industry statistics indicate that, eventually, most companies will need to address the burgeoning load of data.

The number of emails employees send and receive is growing at a rate of 29% annually. With the proliferation of attachments, the size of the emails is growing even more dramatically. It's rising 92% each year. A typical 3,000-user email system will handle more than one terabyte of message traffic annually.

To understand what that means in terms of storage management, consider a 3,000-user system where most users receive 60 emails per day with an average size of 50,000 kilobytes. If the average mailbox has a 40,000,000KB limit, it now takes just over 13 days for a mailbox to fill up.

Add in the 29% growth in number of emails and the 92% growth in email size, and by the end of 2003, that same mailbox will fill up in about five and a half days. By the end of 2006, the mailbox will be full before one third of a day has passed. Think about the loss of productivity you're likely to see then.

[GRAPH OMITTED]

3,000       Size of company

            Average number of
60          emails per day per
            employee

50,000      Average size of emails

29%         Growth rate of daily
            emails

92%         Growth rate of the size
            of emails

40,000,000  Average mailbox limit

Year                                  2002        2003        2004

Avg size of emails                   50,000      96,000     184,320
Avg number of emails per emp/day       60          77         100
Avg storage per day per emp        3,000,000   7,392,000   18,432,000
Avg mailbox limit                  40,000,000  40,000,000  40,000,000
Days before mailbox limit reached    13.33        5.41        2.17

Year                                  2005        2006

Avg size of emails                  353,894      679,477
Avg number of emails per emp/day      129          166
Avg storage per day per emp        45,652,326  112,793,182
Avg mailbox limit                  40,000,000  40,000,000
Days before mailbox limit reached     0.88        0.35

Bill Tolson is a senior consultant, Industry Solutions, for StorageTek (Louisville, Cola.)

www.storagetek.com