Mastery Webinar Series: Strategies to Simplify Email Data Management

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome all of you to this webinar series. Thank you so much for taking time from your schedule to join this. We’ll get started and I’ll walk you through the strategies which will help you manage your email data better. This is a new series of webinars that we are launching, which we will be having fortnightly. The core idea in this would be to share our ideas, best practices, learnings from other customers and live case studies as well to bring you up to speed with what’s happening with your peers and what we are researching out here. So that will help you adopt some pf these practices and improve your IT operations. So these are going to be short, sharp, 30 minute in duration. So what will be your takeaway in this? We will be sharing with you myths, facts, best practices, technologies and live case studies that will be a learning for you. What will be our takeaways? For us it is going to be learning from you about your environments, your challenges, how you are managing your email data Today, which can in turn help us improve our offerings and probably come back to you with more content which can help you leverage newer technologies in your space. This series of webinars will be followed by unlimited Q&A.
• #3: So let’s first establish the context, why does email data need to be managed? The question we should answer first, because sometimes it may appear that it is all there in my clients, in my mail server, what’s there to manage in this?
• #4: First and foremost why you would want to manage email data is that it is growing, it is growing at a very rapid rate. So if you look at these statistics, what they suggest is that one average business user in a year would grow at the rate of 4 GB. This means that the combined volume of mail sent and recieved by an average business user would be around 4 GB a year and this keeps on growing. You have to maintain all that information. Why is that? Because it has been traditionally for quite a few years now, email is the primary digital only id and hence everything lands up in that email box. By 2019 it is estimated that an average business user would transact about 129 mail a day, that means a 4GB growth a year which means your mailboxes are bloating and you as an IT team are burdened to deal with this. And what about your mail systems, can they handle this humongous growth. This is one of the main reasons why email data needs to be managed.
• #5: Second this is, it is not just the volume, but there is a lot of critical content in email, so it is estimated that 60% business data is stored in email, so as a business can you afford to lose a mail or an entire mailbox? Second, as we are going into more and more digitization, it also means that long term retention of data is becoming very critical to de-risk your business. It is a mandatory thing almost, so are you ready to support your regulation requirements and litigations? Email is an active carrier of critical information, which means that if you get the right email at the right time, when you need to take the decision, it can impact your decision making speed and ability. So higher IT systems, would you be able to get an access to historical mail within seconds of any duration, is that question something which is relevant to your business? Another this is that when I am migrating an email platforms, the biggest challenge for me is how do I pull out the email data from my current platform? It could be in TB and typically most systems have rate controls on their platforms to disallow you to pull out large volumes of data at one stroke, so sometimes, 1 TB of data migration could take a month or so. That’s a long time to wait, to just move data from one platform to the other. So its slow, challenging and vendor dependent, so is your business ready to accept this? So these are some of the reasons you want to manage email data. So whether your email system is hosted in premise or on the cloud, let’s look at some of the popular methods which organisations are using today. This is come from our research with our customers and speaking to people who are engaged with us to buy our solutions, and as we learn from them, this is a culmination or collection of those stories.
• #6: So first, very popular method people use is, they download mail to endpoint which is your desktop, laptop, PC’s and those are periodically saved. So what’s the pre-requisite for this? First thing is you have to invest in a robust and very scalable backup solution. You will need to invest in additional storage which means that if combined, your storage across all the PC’s is 1 TB, you would need an additional TB and tapes to keep these backups, you would have to invest in a multi site backup architecture, because everything cannot be maintained at the same site. That’s very high risk. So what happens with this, what are the outcomes to your business? Essentially it is a lot of investment with poor ROI. One, backups are periodic, which means they are taken once a day, once in an hour, once in few hours, and whatever happens between backups is lost, which means that if I receive a mail after a backup and if I delete it before the next backup, I don’t really capture that. So that means my systems are not compliance ready, since all the data may not have been captured in the backups. These backups are typically just meant for restoration of email and they are not really for search, so you cannot really go for looking for email based on content or from ID, send ID, attachment information etc. You cannot search this. The next big challenge is that I take a backup regularly, I have it all stored away, but now keeping it safe and secure is another challenge. And what you can do with these systems is at the most you can recover a point in time state, that’s all. So your IT team is occupied with not very productive activity and this is the most important, all your users depend entirely on the IT team, which means additional burden on the IT team. So these are the challenges which come with using this method of backup.
• #7: The second most popular method which companies are deploying is to deploy quota limits, so they say that we will deploy a limit on the mailboxes and let the users deal with deleting mail and controlling the mailbox size. So what happens? First is, users and IT teams spends a lot of time cleaning the mailboxes to contain the bloat. So there is a use of time at both ends. Users, since they have a very limited space, at times, they are forced to delete very critical mail as well. Most organisations expect their users to download their mails into PST files and clean them from their mailbox. Now this is a technically involved activity, expecting your non techie users to do this is maybe asking for too much. Many users in many organisations are setting auto forward to their personal gmail accounts, this is how they maintain backups. And then they delete freely from here, knowing very well that in that Gmail box which give 30GB storage and more, the mails are safe. So what happens? You end up with a jungle with all the data splintered across, there is no central control of the data. So first, biggest outcome is that there is a productivity loss, cause users are busy choosing which mail to delete and which to keep. There is a mail loss risk with this, because all the data stored on their PC which they download and keep on a PST, it is stored on a PC, the PC can get lost, it can get attacked by a virus, the laptop could get stolen and you may lose that critical information. There is a privacy risk, especially if you are allowing the forwarding option, a lot of companies do btw. So that mail is now going into an inaccessible, external email ID, which only that user can access. And because of the splintered data, there is no single point of control, so the organisation as such does not own the data, the data belongs to the user, whereas it should be the other way round. You as a company own all that information, it just happens to be with the user. But if you look at the scenario, you’ll find that there is no control, the user controls it all, which is why we hear horror stories like when users leave an organisation, they just carry the laptop with them, or they delete all the mail and go, and the company as no clue, how to get that mail back.
• #8: This is another very popular method, a many to one email journaling, so let me explain this, so what people are doing is, they are setting up a journal. A journal is a rule, which is in most mail platforms, which tells the system whether a copy of every mail sent and received should be sent to this particular email ID. Typically it is called a journal email ID. So a copy of every mail sent by every user is deposited into one single ID, that is why it is called many to one email journaling, then the IT team, configures a desktop email client, Outlook, Thunderbird whatever, to pop this mail from a single journal email ID to a PC or local laptop, which creates a PST or EML file. These PST files are backed up regularly to a secondary storage and rotated. So here is your system. What’s the problem with this, firstly, it is just a notional security tick mark. Because this data has no practical use, it cannot be used in compliance very easily because all the data is splintered across PST’s and imagine searching all these PST’s for a set of email of a user of a particular period, which is typically how the compliance would come to you. Even data safety is notions, because these PC’s, who is going to ensure their safety, security and reliability. It is just to say my data is there. Naturally all this data which is splintered across all these PST’s is difficult to search from. Try recovering mail from these PST’s, it can go into days. So this particular method, which is also very popular, and people feel that their archiving is done and they have tick marked on their security requirements, infosec requirements, actually that’s not really true, so that’s why we classify this as a myth.
• #9: The other method is, there is some confusion, which actually we would like to take up in another webinar, which is dedicated entirely to clear this confusion, which is, a lot of people use archival with archival, so there is an archival feature on most desktop clients which is Thunderbird, Outlook, or any client you take, what that does is, it moves mail, older than a particular date, archived mail older than a month, so what it essentially does, is that it takes all the mail older than a month and it will move it to a local store on the PC or the laptop, so essentially it will make another PST file. This is automatically done and the whole Idea is to keep the mailbox trim and lean. So the mail is also removed from the server mailbox and now it resides only on the local PC, so what is the outcome? This means loss of control, cause for the business the data is actually gone, it is on the client and we all know that clients essentially are a jungle zone. So the business has lost control on the data. Finding mail in that data is next to impossible because these files are distributed across client devices and there is no central console which can actually search through those. Again the same challenge, these archive files which are typically PST or Embox files, who is going to keep them safe ans secure, we cannot leave it to the user really.
• #10: Now we discussed four popular methods which are deployed by IT teams, in a lot of companies. I would say that in my experience of meeting customers and from our own experience of working with email systems ourselves supply, we have seen that about 95% of our customers would be deploying one or more of these in their IT environment and then the outcomes I have shown here also. Which means that those teams are actually suffering from trying to grapple with managing all this data and trying to get a control on it. The question is, is there some Brahmastra, is there one method which can resolve all these challenges, so let’s see.
• #11: So we have found one, and we have actually been suggesting it to a lot of customers, and all those customers who have actually taken this up have been pretty happy with this, so we propose a hierarchical storage architecture, which combines two solutions, your primary email solution and a cloud archival solution. So let me share with you how this works.
• #12: So what is a hierarchical storage architecture? So what it does is, it splits the mailbox of a user into two mailboxes, I repeat a hierarchical storage architecture, splits the mailbox of every user into two mailboxes, there will be one live mail store which will be on the primary mail solution and retaining mail only for a small period, typically 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, so there is a retention policy applied and this system is auto cleaning my mail. Anything older than my defined level. So my live mailbox is lean and mean. And second, I have an archive mail store that each user has one, which is on the cloud, and it retains mail for the long turn, all the mail. So what am I saying is that, I am saying that if I have a 100 mail totally, my live mail store will contain 20 of those mail, which are my most recent mails, which I need most frequently, which I will search on regularly and which I will sync with my mobile and desktop client on a regular basis, so it is a small size. Whereas my archive mail store will contain all the 100 mails, including these recent 20 as well, and there it will be stored for the long term, and I will access it only when I want to refer to an old mail, which is infrequently. A secure portal where I can go and search for an older mail. So I am talking about having a quick use, it is just the way the mobile works. If you configure your mobile device to your email server, it does not get all the mail, it only gets about 30 days worth of mail, so we are saying, why not apply a similar solution to your desktop client.
• #13: So here is how it works, so if you look at this diagram and if you follow my mouse, this is the primary mail set up, it could be exchange, it could be mithi solution, it could be office 365, G Suite whatever. Here is a user who is sending and reviewing mail, using this primary mail set up, now while the mails are being sent and received, a copy is being sent into the archival store on the cloud. Here is where the mails kept for the long term, they are never deleted, it is a one way street. Whereas on the primary mail setup, there is a retention policy which maintains these mails for a short period, typically, 1-3 months, so this user essentially has two mailboxes, one a primary mailbox and one an archive mailbox. So he goes to the primary mailbox to access the frequently used mail, and the recent mail, and he will go to the archival store to access al the mail, the historical mail. And now let’s look at the other benefit, now using this archival store, the user is also empowered to recover his own mail. So he doesn’t need to bother the IT team. So this closes the loop, if you see this whole loop is closed by deploying a tamper proof, large scale archival store for each user. Now, where is where the admin or the top management sits and they can very comfortable scan through he mail boxes of tall the users using an umbrella or broad search and find mails which they need for compliance, or for knowledge discovery or for tracking an employee behaviours or whatever, and then they can export these to PST, if they need and give it to compliance, so this closes the loop from the management end. So we use a journaling capability and capture a copy of every mail sent and received, before delivery. The archive is a one way street, so this archival store on the cloud is highly durable, it is continuous, there are no tapes, no volumes, there are no mounts, there is no USBs, it is just one big infinite store. These mail are all search ready and accessible by an ediscovery portal, either by the user or by the manager. And then you deploy a retention period of a primary and you have utopia, so this is how it works. So user in fact has two mailboxes.
• #14: Top benefits of this, so in one solution, we have solved all the problems which I discussed in the top 4 slides, so we have a copy of all the mail, safe and kept away without any human intervention, there is not IT team involved, there is no tape backups being taken, there are no endpoint backups which are dependent on the laptops being on, none of all that. We just make sure that we journal a copy of the email and then the user can do whatever he wants with the mail, we don’t care. So now because of the mailboxes on the primary are smaller, they work faster, the Outlooks sync better, there is less bloat on the PST, so the Outlook performance is also not impacted, so this gives multiple benefits, that way. Since all the data is captured and accessible at all times, completely online, there is nothing like I need the data of July 2015, so let me mount that tape. July 2015 data will come to you in 7 seconds and any other data will come to you in equal amount of time. Most important, the users now are empowered, so there is less load on the IT team, there is higher productivity, cause every time a user requests for a lost mail, he might have to wait two days before he gets it back and even IT teams lose days to mount tapes and find that mail and sometimes they don’t even get it.
• #15: So I have shared with you one strategy as promised which will mitigate a lot of your challenges. So we plan to have more such, because we have a lot of such stories to share with you, whee we will be bringing to you our learnings from our customers and our own research and sharing that with you. Now this is just a one pitch size, Vaultastic can fit the bill for that archival store very well. It is our solution, here are some of our customers who are using and many of them are using hierarchical mail architecture to benefit from that. It is a very scalable solution which is hosted on the Amazon stack which we can use to deploy such an architecture.