Resilient Messaging, Improved Discovery in Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 ups the ante for data protection when compared to previous versions. As the cornerstone of Microsoft’s Unified Communications solution, Exchange Server now offers customers new integrated e-mail archiving and retention and discovery features to preserve and discover information, even as the volume of e-mail skyrockets at organizations of every size.

Best of all, businesses that adopt Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 will find critical tools to help them meet compliance and e-discovery requirements without having to change the way they work, while at the same time reducing IT costs and improving risk management. New features for archiving, retention, and discovery in Exchange 2010 include: personal archive, retention policies, legal hold, single item restore, multi-mailbox search, and role-based access control.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, together with SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office, FAST Search, and Unified Communications, is a vital component of The Microsoft E-Discovery Framework, which helps organizations with their e-discovery readiness.

Additional product enhancements in Exchange Server 2010 also address high-availability, disaster recovery, and back up. Out-of-the-box features in Exchange 2010 will help companies save money and increase productivity, reliability, and resiliency.

Get Control of Your E-Mail

There's no doubt about it, organizations need to get control of e-mail: what they have, where it is, the ability to search and retrieve, as well as save records for appropriate periods of time and delete messages they don't need.

"Company e-mail isn't going away, and the risks associated with non-compliance are getting worse," says Mark Diamond, president and CEO of Contoural Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based technology consultancy that specializes in helping organizations achieve litigation readiness.

Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in 2006 and the update in December 2007 sent companies scrambling to get their electronically stored information litigation-ready; however, the truth of the matter is that many organizations are still spinning their wheels.

According to Diamond, less than 20 percent of organizations nationwide are litigation-ready and records-compliant. Furthermore, the stakes are high. Discovery accounts for about 50 percent of litigation costs today and is increasing. "Most discovery is around electronic documents and mostly e-mail," he says.

It's not unheard of that a discovery bill will cost a company two to three times the cost of improving its IT processes. And litigation is one instance where size doesn't matter. A smaller organization is just as likely to incur a litigation bill for millions of dollars as a larger organization.

Jerod Powell, co-founder and CEO of InfinIT Consulting, a San Jose, Calif.-based IT consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, notes a recent escalation in customer interest in archiving solutions. "Even among smaller companies there's an enormous demand to archive messages," he says, as well as a growing trend to set policy around messaging.

That's good news, since the U.S. Sentencing Commission in January published its proposed amendment emphasizing document retention policies as part of an effective compliance program.

"In the last 12 months we're finding that companies at first acknowledge having one problem with e-mail, then they realize that they have several problems," says Shelia Childs, research director, storage technologies and strategies at Gartner Inc. The three most common e-mail pain points are e-discovery, storage, and mailbox capability.

Gartner expects the e-mail archive products market to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 21.2 percent, reaching $1.23 billion in 2013.

A Closer Look

By addressing archive, retention, and discovery in Microsoft Exchange 2010, Microsoft not only addresses e-discovery but the costs associated with bulging e-mailboxes and storage. The newest product version also enhances fault tolerance, speeds disaster recovery, and improves overall data security.

For starters, the Exchange 2010 infrastructure gives organizations storage hardware options with support for both traditional storage area networks (SANs) and lower cost direct-attached storage (DAS) or Serial ATA (SATA) and just a bunch of disks (JBOD). Exchange 2010 requires a fraction as much disk I/O as Exchange 2003 or 2007, which is why organizations can opt for commodity disk drives and still receive high performance.

InfinIT's Powell is all for it. "Why should companies have to buy a SAN if they don't need one?" he says.

At the same time, Microsoft makes it more affordable for companies to provide users with larger mailboxes, which is critical at a time when organizations live and die by e-mail.

Using the Personal Archive, users can drag PST files to a specialized mailbox that's associated with their primary mailbox. The Personal Archive appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App for easy access. Administrators can apply the new automated retention policies in Exchange 2010 to allow users to either delete or archive e-mails, or to control when messages are automatically moved from a primary mailbox to the Personal Archive based on expiration dates.

Taking compliance to the next level, Microsoft provides a Legal Hold feature in Exchange 2010 that retains mailbox items, including e-mail, appointments, and tasks from both the primary mailbox and Personal Archive. A Web-based Multi-Mailbox Search feature in Exchange 2010 allows designated individuals to search large volumes of message types stored in mailboxes across one or more Exchange 2010 servers for legal discovery or investigative purposes.

What Exchange administrator won't appreciate the new easy-to-use and cost-saving Single Item Restore or Deleted Item Retention feature for backup and disaster recovery?

Gartner's Child notes that Microsoft paid attention to the look and flow of the new features in Exchange 2010, which speaks volumes to what organizations are asking for. "The user experience is critical when it comes to minimizing the impact of the solution and not disrupting the daily workflow," she says.

Archive, retention, and discovery are nothing without mailbox resiliency for data protection, security, and cost of ownership. Exchange 2010 is architected for high availability and fast failover. When deploying the latest version of Exchange organizations can opt for a simple two-server configuration with full redundancy, a capability that in the past required a minimum of four servers and a separate solution for databases.

Today, Database Availability Groups (DAGs) of up to 16 mailbox servers use continuous replication to update database copies, manage individual database failures, and provide automatic recovery from disk, server, and datacenter failure.

Powell is currently working on a beta Exchange 2010 EBS migration with a venture capital business customer that reached out to his organization specifically looking for the mobility, archive, and disaster recovery features.

"The customer will save money and realize improved resiliency and disaster recovery," says Powell.

With an Exchange 2010 online or premise deployment, Microsoft provides customers a more flexible, robust, and reliable messaging platform while reducing IT costs and improving administrative controls around compliance and management.