Hi, I'm Mike Weaver, one of the product managers here at Quest. And I'm here with Paul Robichaux as well.
Hi, Mike.
And we're going to talk about PST files in federal agencies.
Man, PSTs are the gifts that keeps giving because we've been talking about the reasons why PSTs are bad, literally for 20 years. This conversation never goes away. But there's a different spin on it when you think specifically about federal government agencies. Why is that?
It's really important, and there's actually a really good survey done by the National Archives and Records Administration and the Federal Agencies Records Management.
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- And the most recent report, 50% of respondents said they still actively use PST files as their email storage.
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Which is just shocking considering how sensitive a lot of this data is.
It's shocking, but it's not surprising. And the reason I say that is federal agencies have got a lot of constraints. And we hear the same things from commercial customers. People have constraints on their budget, they have constraints on technology. Let's not forget that there are a significant number of US federal agencies that still have exchange on-premises.
Very true.
So for example, I know that there are agencies within the Department of Defense where they have on-premises exchange, they have on-premises ID. People use PST files that are stored in network drives, which is like the four-way-- whatever the four-way equivalent of a trifecta is of stuff you don't want to do. But their IT environment, and their budget restrictions, and their technology roadmap put them in this position. So rather than shaming them, let's talk about some practical things that agencies need to be thinking about about why they need to move away from PST files. So what's so bad about them?
Well, and I think a lot of them is they've been around for a very long time. And the way that PST files are, the longer they've been around, the bigger they are, and the more unstable they can become. And that can really cause problems such as data loss but other compliance issues like e-discovery problems.
E-discovery is a huge problem because the whole point behind having a National Archives and Records Administration, their job is to tell the federal government what data must be retained, in what format it must be retained, and to control access to it essentially. And so the reason for this survey was for them to survey, how bad is it really?
Well, it turns out if 19% of those agencies have got PST files, it could have we don't know what, owned by we don't know who, with no telling what's in them. That makes their job for records management exponentially harder.
And for organizations that are ready, or federal agencies that are ready to address this problem, they need a pretty senior solution because these files are just-- in particular, network shares just around. And this is very sensitive data, so it's not just a very simple looking at the NT file owner or something like that to determine who it belongs to. You need an actual pretty senior solution to actually open these up, look at who the most common center, most common receiver, and all these other items to determine who actually owns that files.
But also, too, this has been going on for 20-plus years. So you have lots of people that have left the organization, are in different roles now. And the files are just very difficult to remediate and identify before you even start about the remediation problem.
Sure. When you think about it that way, there are remediation processes in place already for someone who retires from the federal government. When they leave, they leave him behind some papers and some artifacts. And somebody has to go through them and decide, OK, we're going to keep these, we're going to get rid of these.
That's not always the case for PST files. What happens instead is people's files end up getting shoveled into some directory on a server somewhere. And essentially from a management standpoint, they vanish. They become invisible. Nobody knows it they're there, nobody's inventoried them.
So as you said, a tool that can help you discover what PST files are on the network, figure out who they belong to, not just from the simple clues, like NT file ownership, but also from context or content, and then help you decide what you actually need to keep and then move it for you is absolutely a requirement. You're not going to be able to do this manually, especially not with a 20-plus-year backlog of these files moldering away on some disk somewhere.
And we talk about 20 years. It's also 20 years of habits. So people are very addicted to these files. It's how they've been operating for so long. The state is critical to their day-to-day work.
Sure.
So you need an automated system that allows users to keep read-only access to them because even going a day or two, or sometimes if it's really large, a week or so without their data, that is a work stoppage moment for a lot of people, where especially the knowledge worker community, where email's their main working item. So you need a solution that can control and ensure that they keep access to this data and ensures that it gets to the other side very-- with minimal errors in process.
Yeah. But what else is a work stoppage moment is when the disk that your PSTs are on fails, and now you don't have any of them. That's bad, and I've actually seen that happen with friends of mine in the federal community, where I need this PST file from two years ago that has this really critical data on it. And the disk on the server is dead, and it's going to take 48 hours to restore a backup.
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