Avoid Bush’s E-mail Blunder: Archive your data, don’t just backup.
If you have been reading the paper this week, you may have noticed that the Bush Administration’s most recently uncovered blunder involved losing over 22 million e-mails. An immediate reaction might be the question: How it even is possible to lose and then recover 22 million e-mails?
The Bush White House failed to implement a proper archiving system for e-mail. Instead, they were backing up e-mails on tapes and manually labeling them. 94 days of e-mails were mislabeled, therefore unsearchable, and effectively lost. The e-mail archiving problems apparently came to light in 2006, and it has taken over 3 years of litigation work to find the data on backup tapes. It is now speculated that it will take the National Security Archive until 2014 to sort through these backup tapes before releasing the information to the public. (Years of work could have been prevented if the Bush White House had archived with a company like Sonian.)
What can you learn from this dilemma? Archive your e-mail in the cloud. Backup tapes are not sufficient. There is a lot of misinformation about the difference between archiving and backup. Regular backup does not meet most compliance regualtions such as HIPPA, Sarbonnes Oxley, or SEC 174A to name a few. These regulations require multiple records, specific organization, random sampling, and advanced search methods. Satisfying these requirements is simply not possible with regular backups.
Beyond just meeting compliance regulations, an archiving solution like Sonian increases worker productivity. Mislabeling tapes is common, and even if labeled correctly, searching through backup tapes is time consuming. Quick access to information can be the differentiator in a legal case, a sale, or interactions with clients.
The advanced search functions allow employees to search for e-mails within certain date ranges, between certain employees, through simple or complex keywords, by attachment type, and through many more venues. The repositories allow users to search by over 400 different attachment file types: pdfs, .xls, .doc, wav, jpg, etc. Its even possible to search in the text in an attachment of an e-mail. The near infinite power of the cloud makes it possible to find a specific e-mail of say, 22 million e-mails in seconds instead of years.
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