Data protection is a term we all throw around as if data is a big block of interchangeable 1s and 0s. More and more enterprises and governmental agencies are finding out the hard way that all data is not created equal. Different data types require different backup policies, retention times, archiving and even restore requirements. The nature of some data may also change the way you want to back it up, deduplicate it, restore it, and archive it. With these choices, it’s becoming less feasible to claim ignorance on data protection - let alone claiming you simply don’t have the data.

As Rick Wolf said in his DataKOS Blawg last year,

…This is a take-no-prisoner compliance area and courts are not accepting the “keystone cops” defense anymore.

Email is the best example for three reasons. First, you probably backup more email than any other data type, second it is both business-critical and subject to all sorts of regulations and legal requirements, and third, a large portion of it is typically duplicate data.

Yet according to recent article in Computer Technology Review entitled, Email Archiving: No Room for Excuses, companies are still not getting it. They said,

…most companies are treating emails like all of their other data—just backing up to tape or worse, retain it for 30 days and delete it.

Good luck defending yourself in that lawsuit.

But just how prevalent is this problem? In a recent survey, The Enterprise Content Management Association (AIIM) found that,

Companies depending on backup tape are rarely able to meet regulators' demands for completeness or timeliness. In fact, AIIM asked its users, "If your organization was sued by a former customer or citizen, how long would it take to produce all of the information related to that person?" and 27 percent answered more than one month.

Granted, some of us wish our emails would go away and stay away. Take the US government for example.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Mental Health director Ira Katz recently wrote an internal email that I’ll bet he wishes would just evaporate. There had just been an investigative news report by CBS News which said that the VA hospital knowingly covered up information on US military veteran suicide rates. Three days after the story ran, Katz wrote an email to his media relations department with the subject line of - “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.” His email began with, “Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month...”

Now, that email, along with hundreds more, are being reviewed by the Federal District Court of Northern California, where a lawsuit against the VA is being heard.

With the growing volume of email we are all generating and the growing regulatory pressure to backup, archive, and restore that email easily, enterprises need to be aware of the content of their data volume, particularly of their email. Using a powerful backup system, like a VTL with a ContentAware architecture that knows the content of your data enables you to support your backup and retention policies, deduplicate only the data you want—and at the level that works best—and restore your files at nearline speeds.

So, given all of this information to consider, one question remains…

How well do you know your data?