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December 12, 2008
• Vol.30 Issue 50
Page(s) 22 in print issue
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Backup vs. Archive
Understanding The Difference When It Comes To Email
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In its "E-mail Archiving & Management Report 2008," analyst firm CMS Watch found that 80% of mail data is duplicated because enterprises lack a basic understanding between email backup and advanced archiving.
“In order to survive, most enterprises today depend on high volumes of email running efficiently through their system. Virtually all enterprises require that messaging be a part of the underlying IT infrastructure. Many decision-makers describe systems such as Microsoft’s Exchange as the single most important communication and business application within their operation,” the report states.
That being said, when it comes to backup and archiving, most organizations tend to lump the two into the same category. While in both cases, data streams are passed to tape, disk, or optical storage based upon policies and configurations often using common infrastructure, they are disparate in their fundamental business purposes. This disparity and misunderstanding often results in shortcomings in the backup and/or archiving needs within the organization.
 The Main Difference
The most basic tenet to understand between the two is that backups create duplicate replicas of email data, while archiving removes a single instance of the information from a production environment to a storage system conducive for long-term retention.
Email backup covers business continuity, allowing data to be restored in the event of human error or disasters in which data is lost, destroyed, or corrupted. Today, organizations employ a variety of backup solutions that create “snapshots” or traditional backups duplicating information onto removable media. By capturing incremental moments-in-time, it affords the opportunity to delete messages and attached files from one backup to the next.
Enter archiving.
Driven by the multitude of regulatory compliance laws requiring explicit message retention, storage, and discovery for years, message archiving solutions are much more complex than backups. When data is moved from the production to archival environment, it is tagged and indexed with sophisticated metadata to assist contextual searches, also referred to as e-discovery.
Consider being tasked with finding a series of five-year-old emails from former employees for a legal matter. The chances of backup media containing the information would be slim, as most backups are continuously overwritten over a period of weeks or months. Because many organizations choose to store backups offsite, this would also result in an extensive (and expensive) search. Even if the data were to exist on backup, it would need to be returned to the data center and loaded. There would be no active email or user account with proper credentials for rapid restoration, not to mention the email client may be outdated or even obsolete.
In addition to meeting regulatory compliance, Forrester Research suggests archiving as a best practice for ILM as a means to reduce storage costs, improve overall operational performance, and extend access to information for business intelligence.
Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks (www.barracudanetworks.com), points out additional pluses. “The benefits of email archiving span well beyond the rules and regulations themselves. While the regulations represent a best practice in terms of email management, customers immediately see concrete operational and usability benefits by implementing an email archiving solution. On the infrastructure side, organizations benefit [from] cost savings by migrating old email from their live email infrastructure utilizing expensive transactional storage to less-expensive archival storage. So, what we see here is a win-win—storage cost savings and faster search times.”
Archive Flavors
Once an organization has a firm grasp of the differences, it doesn’t take long to realize that both backup and archiving are necessary for organizations of all sizes, especially those bound to compliance laws. While backup technologies have evolved and matured throughout the years, archival technologies present more of a challenge.
To help alleviate confusion, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMS Watch principal industry analyst for EAM (enterprise asset management) technologies, divides archiving vendors into two categories: policy-centric and archiving-centric.
According to Pelz-Sharpe, policy-centric vendors deliver superior and sophisticated solutions for email records management. They tend to be at the top tier in terms of cost and complexity, and they are most often deployed in highly regulated environments, such as larger enterprises and government agencies. Their target audiences are the business and legal units responsible for meeting stringent regulations for the multitude of compliance laws.
Similarly, archiving-centric vendors can meet the demands of midsized to large organizations; however, they are designed more for the optimization of archiving systems, rely heavily on policy management, and are positioned toward IT buyers for the operational aspects of mail servers for optimization.
Barracuda’s Pao has seen a tremendous demand for message archiving from traditional sales channels and customers, many of whom are in the midmarket, rather than in regulated industries. “The market for email archiving has gone well beyond finance and healthcare into everyday businesses with as few as 50 to 100 employees. Every organization should be able to use it. Organizations from a range of vertical markets recognize that email archiving leads to a more efficient network from an IT standpoint, as well as from an end user’s perspective.”
From the estimates of research firm IDC that sales of email archiving solutions will increase two-fold over the next three years, from $631 million in 2007 to $1.7 billion by 2011, Pao’s statement appears to be on target with future trends. 
by Sandra Kay Miller
What Are The Differences?
| Backup | Archiving | | Operational backup and disaster recovery | Regulatory compliance and legal records retention | | Copies messages | Offloads messages | | Multiple copies | Single instances | | No indices or search capabilities | Indexed for discovery and retrieval | | Utilizes storage capacity | Reduces storage capacity | | Short retention (days or weeks) | Long retention (years) | | IT responsibility | Executive and legal responsibility | |
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