Nobody likes to delete email. We’re all afraid that sometime down the line we’ll end up scouring our computers for that one message or that one attachment that in a fit of spring cleaning we sent to the trash can. Just look at Google’s Gmail, one it’s major selling points has been that with impressive storage space “you never need to delete another email.” Just hit the archive button and let your paranoia breath easy.
The Data Center Journal has a great article looking at how our pack rat tendencies towards email can create serious storage nightmares. Specifically author Alan Armstrong focuses on Outlook’s PST files–the files that Microsoft’s popular email client creates when messages are saved locally as opposed to on an Exchange server. What Armstrong points out is that users often save email locally to stay within their server storage quotas. These local PST files then get wrapped up in regular backups and take up space on the backup server.
He walks through a hypothetical situation where ten employees get an email with a 1MB attachment. Each one saves the message locally and then each of these 1MB messages get copied in backups. If those PST files are then modified or even opened, they end up getting backed up again. After 10 backups what started out as 1MB on the email server is now 100MBs on the backup server. That’s not the kind of rapid growth that companies want to encourage.
What Armstrong suggests is that companies centralize email archives, pointing out that this is good from a security perspective as well as a storage perspective. Centralization gives companies more control over their email, ensuring that if confidential data needs to be destroyed, there’s only one place that they need to look. And the process of searching for old communications becomes much easier.
In fact, many of Armstrong’s thoughts on dealing with email centralization make good sense from a broad data security perspective. Almost every other week we see a news article that begins “Company X may have put many of its customers at risk for identity theft when an employee laptop containing personal information was stolen last week.” Keeping any kind of data, email or otherwise, spread across dozens of local machines and mobile devices is just asking for something bad to happen.
Companies serious about reigning in data storage and security issues need to put alot of thought into centralizing their data, either through internal solutions or by outsourcing to storage vendors. This isn’t a situation where you spread your eggs across multiple baskets, wasting time and energy protecting your scattered assets. Instead, to paraphrase Andrew Carnegie put all your eggs in one very safe, backed up, secure basket, and then guard that basket as best you can.
No related posts.
