Enterprise E-mail Call

Written by Peter Buxbaum

MIT 2010 Volume: 14 Issue: 8 (September)

An ongoing exploration by the Army into development of a comprehensive, centrally managed e-mail system is highlighting the many potential benefits and stumbling blocks facing the military and other large organizations contemplating such a move.

For more than a year, Army leaders have expressed a desire to do something about how e-mail services are provided to more than two million users, who range from warfighters in theater to uniformed and civilian personnel stationed in facilities worldwide to retirees and family members. What course the Army will pursue, however, remains under discussion at this point.

The Army’s e-mail conundrum includes a number of facets. First, it is not really an Army problem, strictly speaking, but a Department of Defense problem. The Army is merely taking the lead on a project that will eventually encompass the entire military.

Second, the Army currently operates dozens of e-mail systems on a distributed basis, many of them localized to a single base. Localization has advantages when it comes to performance, but its disadvantages are many. It is far more expensive to manage and does not provide lifetime e-mail addresses. Personnel often switch e-mail addresses when they get reassigned, and that means they are unreachable by those who have not been updated with a forwarding address.

A third problem involves the geometrically multiplying storage requirements of modern e-mail systems. Government agencies and commercial entities alike are legally required to hold onto e-mails for specific periods of time, and some specialists want to store them in perpetuity. This is placing a strain an existing data storage facilities and suggests a requirement not only for more storage facilities to be built, but also for greater storage efficiency.

Fourth is the question of collaboration. The Army has billed its e-mail revamping as an e-mail and collaborative services (EMCS) program. That appears to reflect the fact that, in many military organizations as well as in the broader business world, users have transformed e-mail into a collaborative platform through the use— and overuse—of the “reply all” button. But what role a collaboration platform might play in complementing the e-mail system is still to be determined.

EMCS started as an all-encompassing concept. But it later whittled down to a much more modest approach that in turn was eventually canceled while the Army considered its options. In February 2009 the Army issued a request for information for a project that would include Microsoft Exchange E-mail, Microsoft SharePoint and Research In Motion Blackberry Enterprise Server applications.

The goal was described as consolidating “850,000+ NIPRNet and 100,000+ SIPRNet business e-mail user accounts on servers currently distributed across Army installations to a centrally managed e-mail system for each network. In addition to the business user accounts, the Army would like to separately migrate an additional 1.2+ million retiree and family member accounts from distributed organizations to a separate centrally managed e-mail system...”

The RFI emphasized the economics of such a move. “Migrating from an installation- based, locally operated environment to a centrally managed enterprise-based EMCS environment will enable the Army to gain improved user productivity, higher system availability, scalability, agility and improved defense posture while reducing capital expenses and operating costs,” it noted.

In March 2010, the Army issued a draft request for proposals of much more modest dimensions. At that point the project was to apply to around 250,000 e-mail users located at 22 stateside installations, most of them affected by the Base Relocations and Consolidation (BRAC) process.

“The idea is to try things out, get the processes figured out with a smaller population before we move onto a bigger, broader capability,” said Colonel Earl Noble, project manager at Army Knowledge Online, at an EMCS Industry Day event earlier this year. “Most of those are in BRAC. So we’re looking at people that are on the move, that are moving from one installation to another. It’s a good opportunity to move them to a new e-mail system, so we want to look at moving those users as a priority.”

Noble anticipated at the time that after the first phase was accomplished, a second EMCS spiral would be introduced in 2012 that would encompass the entire Army and perhaps some additional elements of DoD. Subsequent to Noble’s speech, however, the Army announced that it was cancelling the solicitation, citing end-of-fiscal-year management concerns as well as a variety of issues raised in the responses from industry.

“Taking the approach with an initial operating capability and then later the full operating capability would be a wise choice,” said Jeff Lake, vice president of federal operations at Proofpoint, a provider of messaging security and archive solutions that can be deployed on premises or in the cloud. “E-mail should be a ‘dial-tone’ service for soldiers, working wherever they may be deployed. Managing the messaging security and e-mail infrastructure of that service should be something the Army could outsource, as long as the provider follows the stringent information assurance requirements and certifications dictated by the Army. Where the data center or centers reside should not be a concern as long as fully redundant capabilities exist and the service levels are met.”

DOD MICROCOSM

The problems faced by the Army in providing e-mail services and managing related systems are merely a microcosm of those faced by DoD as a whole. “This isn’t something that the Army is doing because the Army wants to do it,” Lieutenant General Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army chief information officer/G-6, said at the Industry Day event. “We are doing this right now on behalf of DoD to get this initiated. The Department of Defense recognized that there is a need to fix exactly how it was the department was communicating.”

The chief objective of EMCS was to migrate from what Sorenson called a “fractionalized” to a “federated state,” in which e-mail will be managed on an enterprise basis. At that point, “We really begin to save some dollars in terms of how it is we’re affecting and producing and operating this network,” said Sorenson. “That’s exactly why we are having this particular contract award for e-mail messages and collaboration, to get at this particular capability, and it’s global, standardized and obviously more economical.”

“The Army’s biggest problem right now is to try to define exactly what it needs,” said Jim Ferry, director of sales at Compliant Archive Solutions, a provider of e-mail archiving products. “Right now the Army is running an e-mail system that is widely distributed around the world. They are running 14 processing centers for e-mail and 14 data centers to provide backup. That kind of operation produces a tremendous amount of overhead.”

The fluidity of the Army’s work force multiplies the problems associated with dispersed e-mail operations, according to Ed Weatherby, director of marketing at IT Data Storage. “The turnover that they have in the military would drive a corporate IT director batty,” he said. “Then, there is another phenomenon called BRAC, which exponentially increases the issue.” “Every time someone switches bases, they get a new e-mail address and then everyone loses touch with them,” added Dustin Wagner, president of Operational Security Services Inc., a provider of data storage services.

Local access to e-mail is not all on the downside, according to Sean Gerstle, an IT consultant. “With local access, when you sign on in the morning at the office, you are pulling e-mail from a server sitting in the office,” he explained. “That e-mail gets loaded very fast. On the other hand, if you are looking at e-mails in your office and the server is located somewhere across the country, you are introducing network latency. The farther away you are from the server the slower the response time and the greater the chance for packet errors.”

But many organizations, including the Army, are moving toward more centralized e-mail systems because of the upside that centralization can provide. “These include lower capital and administrative costs,” said Gerstle. “With centralization you’re not managing 10 systems all over the country. You’re operating one system with fewer administrators and a lower total cost of ownership. As you move from one assignment to another, your e-mail address doesn’t have to change.”

Besides performance issues, e-mail centralization also presents backup problems. “The system has to be working 24/7 and you need to back up the e-mails without disturbing the system’s operations,” said Gerstle. “You can’t take a system down because the databases are being backed up.” Organizations have taken a number of approaches to deal with the complexity of these upside/downside variables. “Some take a hybrid approach, where the majority of the system is centralized but not all of them,” said Gerstle. For instance, a particular location with very limited bandwidth may not be the best location to centralize.

Additionally, there are optimization solutions that can mitigate the impact of long distances between end-users and e-mail servers, which work in three ways. One involves data deduplication (“dedupe”), which bundles together on the network e-mails that are being sent and forwarded multiple times. Another optimization feature “fools your computer in thinking it is talking directly to an exchange server, even though the server may be 2,000 miles away,” Gerstle said. This eliminates the multiple passes it ordinarily takes for e-mail to be passed from server to desktop, allowing the message to be sent only once across the wire.

Another way that has been found to optimize centralized e-mail system is to have information flow to local area networks (LAN) during times of non-peak traffic. “That way when everyone first signs on in the morning the information is already local,” Gerstle explained. “You don’t have to send it across to the LAN when everyone is signing on.”

STORAGE EXPENSES

Storage, and the ever-increasing volume required, is another issue that needs to be faced with the deployment of a new e-mail system. The draft RFP included no per-mailbox limit, Noble noted at the EMCS Industry Day. “The service provider will propose an optimal method of meeting this requirement for storage,” he added.

“Storage is one of the most expensive parts of an e-mail system,” said Gerstle. “The primary reason is that nobody,” at least in the government sector, “wants to get rid of any e-mails.” The trend in the private sector, Gerstle added, is to delete e-mails when they are no longer legally required to be kept. This saves on storage space and costs, while the prevailing government attitude has the opposite effect.

One potential solution to the rising costs of e-mail storage is to back them up remotely, in an area where land and business costs are cheap and where there are no constraints to the consumption of electricity to power data centers. That was the idea behind building a huge data center in North Dakota, said Wagner.

“I can buy an acre of land for what you would pay for a square inch inside the Beltway,” he said with only a measure of exaggeration. “We need to get data centers off the East Coast. People think they need to see their data, but, if they were to visit the data center, what are they going to see?” Wagner said he can migrate a petabyte—that is, 1,000 terabytes or one million gigabytes—of data within 60 days. He added that Operational Security Services Inc. uses a fifth generation system storage system that includes better automatic failover features and allows the storage of “more usable data in a much smaller space and at a much cheaper price” than most systems in use today. Deduping is another storage efficiency strategy. “That way if someone sends 10 people the same e-mail, only one copy gets stored,” said Gerstle.

E-discovery requirements are another consideration when deploying a new e-mail system. E-discovery refers to the exchange of electronic information by parties involved in litigation, or to the ability of investigators to find e-mail involving people under investigation. Since e-mail has become such an important mode of communication and documentation, courts require parties to be able to produce e-mails relevant to a legal action upon demand.

“E-discovery is something that will be included in the scope of this contract, including the ability to get control of e-mails and lock them down as well as the ability to discover, search and find things within the e-mail,” Noble told industry representatives.

“E-discovery is becoming more and more important since NARA has updated their guidelines on what would constitute a ‘federal record’ of electronic communication, meaning it would need to be retained following the policies,” noted Lake. “The Proofpoint Enterprise Archive solution double-blind encrypts the data in our elastic cloud, meaning only the customer has the keys to the data. It can then be easily searched through Outlook or OWA, with all communications between the on-site appliance and the cloud being encrypted. No longer does an organization have to worry about stacking storage servers in their data center for e-mail archive”.

The draft RFP included a requirement to be able to conclude an e-mail search for e-discovery purposes within 30 seconds. “We think that is archaic in today’s world,” said Ferry. “Waiting 30 seconds for a search to complete is an eternity.”

Ferry said that Compliant Archive Solutions’ appliance can chop search time down to two to three seconds, no matter what the volume of data that needs to be searched. “We re-digitize every e-mail, which is why the search is so fast.”

A single Compliant appliance, deployed in existing servers and storage systems, can serve around 20,000 e-mail users. But the appliances can also be stacked to serve as large a population of users as necessary. “It is a non-invasive technology, and it is infinitely scalable,” Ferry said.

Once installed, the appliance directs every e-mail running through an exchange server to be redigitized, restamped and directed to an archive. “The e-mails are directed to an archive on existing storage,” said Ferry. “We don’t impact the functionality of the system or the archive. If someone goes in try to modify or delete an e-mail, we keep a complete audit trial about everything that happens to each one of those e-mails.

“The Army did a 12-month proof of concept with our solution,” Ferry added. “The install was done in approximately five hours. They had zero support calls in the entire 12 months, and their comment regarding the solution was that it was too easy. We recently submitted a bid to slim down a four-year installation to 12 months for less than one-third of the budget that was stated.”

COLLABORATION APPLICATIONS

Then there is the question of the collaboration aspect of EMCS. The Army has presented EMCS as a program covering both e-mail and collaboration, yet little or no mention has been made of collaboration services outside of the context of e-mail. To some analysts, this fails to reflect the growing interest, at least in the corporate world, in social business software (SBS) packages, which provide wiki, blog and Facebook-like applications geared toward business uses.

“The point is that e-mail is being relegated to a point-topoint communications utility, as it was originally intended,” said Jim Kovach, director of federal sales at Jive Software, a provider of SBS solutions. “E-mail was never originally intended for collaboration. We all have been guilty of making it that by pressing ‘reply all’ too often.”

The SBS premise is that real conversations, collaboration, communication and coordination will happen inside communities. “They are searchable and discoverable by others yielding a knowledge capture unlike anything hidden in e-mail folders,” said Kovach.

SBS is much better equipped than e-mail to handle today’s business conversations, Kovach maintained. “What we are finding is the need for engagement. It is not just about having a one-off tool to do blogging or generate a wiki or threaded discussion. It is all of the above, and it is not just for internal employees but also for external partners” in government and the private sector.

Jive’s SBS platform allows for connectivity with those constituencies, as well as with the general public, in order to manage perceptions and derive feedback and ideas.

A recent report from Gartner, the information technology research organization, concluded that “social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities” and that changing demographics “will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications” over the next four years.

The demographics argument is perhaps the most compelling for SBS. As the younger generation conducts more and more of its interactions through social media like Facebook and Twitter they expect the same style of communications when they enter the work place, including the military. ♦

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