Which is best: Exchange 2010 archiving vs. third-party tools

Archiving products have been around for quite some time, but you may not need them with Exchange 2010’s out-of-the-box archiving capabilities. Then again, maybe you do need a third-party archiving tool. Let’s find out.

An archive is not a backup of your data, although some tools use backups as their “archives.” What’s the difference? Backups are typically focused on data restoration in the event of disaster or corruption, and they’re usually overwritten after a short time. Archives, on the other hand, are held for many years (in some cases, 7 to 10, depending on government regulations). Archives are also driven less by a desire to restore content and more by the necessity to turn over materials in a legal matter. Any company, large or small, can be required to turn over its electronic communications data, email being the most common item requested.

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The cost of e-discovery for companies that do not have an archive product in place can be astronomical. Especially costly in the e-discovery process when you don’t have archiving is the proliferation of PST files on users’ desktops due to mailbox quotas imposed to keep the mailbox archives off the data center’s costly SAN. Such local storage may be cheaper and require less IT effort, but this PST data is considered part of the scope for a legal request and must be searched in the event of a legal matter.

What Exchange 2010 offers for e-discovery and compliance

Exchange 2010 SP1 offers several features for managing archive email data:

Journaling can be configured to capture all email in transit in your organization (with Exchange Standard) or directly to specific mailboxes or distribution lists (with Exchange Premium, which requires an enterprise license). Journaling can help meet compliance objectives because it provides a way to copy the data. But it also increases your storage requirements, doesn’t provide a tamper-proof product, and doesn’t stop users from using local PSTs — so it may not hold up in court on its own. In addition, journaling doesn’t provide the e-discovery indexing and search capabilities you can find in an archive product, and it doesn’t have retention configuration settings.

Personal Archive allows all users to have personal archive mailboxes that can be set up in the same production database as their production mailbox. It can also be set in a separate database, a separate server and database, or even the cloud. Users can manually move data to the archive, or data can be moved automatically through retention tags that are automatically or manually applied to the emails by users. The emails (and attachments) are moved — not copied — and the data is indexed for easier discovery through a multiple-mailbox search. The archive can be backed up and/or made more highly available through the Database Availability Group (DAG) continuous-replication product built into Exchange.

Multi-Mailbox Search resides in the Exchange Control Panel (as well as the Exchange Management Shell, a more complicated method of searching), where users with the Discovery Management role assigned can perform discovery searches for the data needed.

A legal hold can be placed on the mailbox of a person under suspicion or involved in a legal situation. With this hold applied, users cannot delete items from their mailboxes or archives. Everything is retained and, thus, is searchable.

Combining these four features can help you gain greater control over the excessive use of PSTs, enables e-discovery, can ensure greater compliance to regulations for email data retention, and makes it easier for employees to access their archives because those archives are now available via Outlook Web Access.

Where Exchange 2010 archiving falls short

Despite these capabilities, Exchange 2010 may not meet your archiving needs.

For one thing, Exchange 2010 no longer uses single-instance storage (SIS). That improved its performance but also means each duplicate email and attachment is recorded multiple times, significantly increasing storage requirements. Thus, you may want an archiving product that provides data deduplication — or perhaps a cloud-based archiving service where you don’t have to worry about how the data is made available, how it is backed up, how the storage grows, and so on.

Another issue with Exchange archiving is that although the features may be baked into Exchange, using them costs extra. For example, you need enterprise client access licenses (CALs) for Outlook users who use the archive feature. Those users also need the highest-cost version of Microsoft Office 2010 — Office 2010 Professional Plus for Outlook — to see the archive mailbox. (Ironically, Outlook 2007 has a free update that allows its users to see the archive.)

A design issue in Exchange 2010’s control methods is that users are primarily in command of their mailboxes and/or retention tagging (unless they are placed on legal hold). Thus, they can delete items that may be considered necessary for regulatory compliance. The journaling feature can reduce that risk but is not as strong in terms of control as you may need for some compliance and e-discovery situations.

Finally, Exchange 2010’s Exchange Control Panel is not as easy to use for a multiple-mailbox search or as polished as most third-party e-discovery products. Plus, most third-party products combine the compliance benefit of journaling with the employee convenience of an archive product (including a PST crawler, which Microsoft’s Exchange team is working on for future release) all in the cloud with a per-user price.

Your specific needs and risk assessments ultimately determine whether you can rely solely on Exchange 2010’s on-premise archiving capabilities. I believe that most companies will find that the built-in features provide everything they need when used together — at the price of more work for IT and a greater cost for storage. If you don’t want to archive on-premise, consider Microsoft’s or others’ hosted Exchange archiving.

This article, “Which is best: Exchange 2010 archiving vs. third-party tools,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.