E-mail archiving is no laughing matter

Computerworld - I have a love/hate relationship with e-mail archiving. I love what it can do, but I hate where this might end up. Don't get me wrong. E-mail archiving is one technology that any business of any size will need to deploy, because it addresses key storage management and data-discovery pain points.
As e-mail message volumes, sizes and attachments continue to grow, they strain storage resources. Adding more storage addresses the problem, but it slows server performance as it manages the growing database. E-mail archiving products siphon off old messages while saving the same attachment in multiple e-mails only once.
Searching restored e-mail databases is equally tedious and time-consuming. Searches take time to complete, since they must scan multiple restored databases that contain a limited number of indexed fields. Message content may be missed as message threads change from conversational to business-oriented, and unsophisticated search engines fail to understand message content or search attachments.
Archiving products circumvent these issues by indexing all message components and including search engines that scan words and content. Yet where is this going?
Every day, we receive e-mails we don't choose to save, much less want to share. These e-mails that bypass internal filters may seem humorous now, but when that SEC auditor asks for all archived e-mails to and from yours truly, will anyone be laughing?
E-mail archiving is serious stuff. While the default option to save all e-mails can be good protection against corporate malfeasance, plans and dreams, along with secrets and schemes, are being dumped into the same bucket and being preserved for a long time. Let's just hope that whoever is sorting through the pile has everyone's best interests at heart.
Jerome Wendt currently works as both a storage engineer and storage analyst. Wendt contributes regularly to a variety of industry trade publications and can be reached at jerome.wendt@att.net.

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