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Tony Byrne

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Think twice before selecting this Barracuda

3-Oct-2008

Tags: E-mail Archiving and Management, Building Business Case, Marketplace at Large

While traveling from Washington, DC to San Jose, CA for KM World last week to speak about (among other things) e-mail archiving, I encountered this advertisement in both airports. You probably know Barracuda as a well-regarded spam-filter vendor, but now they've moved into the e-mail archiving business as well.

The pitch seems obvious: You the busy, jet-setting exec now have one more thing to worry about...but never fear...you just have to plug in this nifty little appliance and you can stay legal.

That certainly sounds good. But it can also cause more problems than it solves.

You see, saving all your messages is actually not the law. In fact, archiving everything willy-nilly can have the opposite effect of leaving you more exposed. Depending on your industry, you likely need to save some of your messages. Knowing what to keep and what to legally and ethically discard is, of course, the realm of proper Records Management. Last I heard, that doesn't come in an appliance.

This advertisement is doubly ironic because, as an appliance that sits in front of your mail server, you actually don't save all your mail. Internal messages go unarchived. But you likely need to save some of those, too. As E-mail Archiving & Management Report readers know, there's a debate in the industry between those who advocate this appliance approach and those vendors who rely on mailserver journaling. The report explains how there's pros and cons to both approaches. As the other Barracuda would say, "No one expects us to agree on everything."

But let's agree on this: saving all your e-mail is no solution to managing the message mountain. You can install an appliance, but you better install some policies too.