IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (38 page)

Table 5.3.
Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Computing

Source: Currier, Guy, Speeding the Cloud, Baseline Magazine, May/June 2011

5.6 Enterprise Applications

An “enterprise application” is an application that is widely used throughout the organization and integrates the operations of many different departments and functions. Enterprise applications are very valuable but can be very complex pieces of software. They require extensive planning to implement and can be very expensive.

For large companies, with hundreds and thousands of users, the value of connecting all of their functions is enormous, but so are the tasks of implementing and administering the software. This chapter discusses several enterprise applications: e-mail,
directory services
, and enterprise resource planning.

E-mail

When organizations are doing their
disaster recovery
planning, one of the applications that is almost always deemed mission critical is e-mail. E-mail has become the lifeblood of communications for virtually all organizations. For a task as simple as seeing if a colleague is free for lunch, many will reach first for the keyboard as opposed to the telephone.

Usage Statistics

A report by the Radicati Group published in 2011 revealed some interesting information about e-mail:

•
There are 3.1 billion e-mail accounts around the world.

•
Corporate users send and receive 105 messages per day on average (33 sent, 72 received).

Educate Your Users on the Key Principles of E-mail

You (or the Training department, if you have one) can offer a class on the e-mail system you use and tips for effective communication. What you need to get across to all your users are some simple principles of using e-mail that are less software oriented and more usage oriented.

•
Keep it brief.
If you don't like reading long e-mails, what makes you think others do?

•
Make the subject line count.
Be as clear in this line as possible. Instead of using “meeting” as your subject line, use something more meaningful, such as “operations review status meeting.”

•
Reply to all e-mails that expect one.
Not every e-mail that is sent needs a reply, but many do. If you send something to somebody, you expect a reply. Provide the same courtesy.

•
Differentiate TO: and CC: recipients.
As a general rule, people on the TO line are people who need to know and/or have to take action with the content of the message. People who are CC'd (which stands for carbon copy, a technology that predates photocopy machines) are generally getting the information on an FYI basis.

•
Use the Reply All button with extreme caution.
This button is probably the largest contributor to e-mail waste.

•
Spell-check all e-mails.
All e-mail programs have a function that allows e-mail to be spell-checked automatically. Activate it.

•
When stressed or angry, don't press the Send button.
Wait until you've had a chance to cool off so that your e-mail isn't overly emotional.

•
Define policies and guidelines for saving e-mail.
How do you want users to save their e-mails? Is there a company policy? Provide your users with a specific plan. Do you want them to store up a month's worth on their hard drive or archive to the network? Your e-mail system has features to help you manage this. You can automatically purge e-mail that reaches a certain age and limit the size of a message, as well as the size of a user's mailbox.

In addition to telling users that they can delete their old e-mail, you should tell them that their e-mail is backed up daily so that they don't feel the need to save every minor note.

Managing E-mail

Because e-mail can quickly get out of control, it needs to be managed aggressively. Managing it can become a large part of your day; if you have a large company, it can become the sole responsibility of a team of people. A number of vendors offer solutions for monitoring e-mail and addressing issues such as spam and viruses. In addition to the following ideas, important aspects related to e-mail are discussed throughout
Chapter 8, Security and Compliance
on
page 205
.

Junk Mail (Spam, Chain Letters,
Phishing
, Jokes, etc.)

Although e-mail can be a very valuable tool for circulating vital information very quickly, it can distribute junk just as fast. If someone receives an e-mail of a joke or a spiritual message that they like, they can circulate it to one person—or thousands—with just a few clicks of the mouse. Although it may seem innocent at first, the growth can be exponential, resulting in massive storage requirements for e-mail servers. It can slow down the delivery of mail because your servers are backed up distributing hundreds or thousands of messages unrelated to work.

Statistics about spam vary from 70 to 90 percent of all e-mail. E-mail packages now let the user identify which e-mail is spam or junk. With a feature like this, once a source of junk mail is identified, any future mail from the same source is immediately deleted. There are also a variety of anti-spam solutions that are implemented at the e-mail gateway so that spam never reaches your users' mailboxes. But even these anti-spam solutions, which are designed to help you mange e-mail, require their own management. Because they aren't foolproof, there may be some issues of false positives (legitimate e-mail identified incorrectly as spam) and false negatives (junk mail identified incorrectly as a legitimate message). These issues can lead to more calls to the Help Desk, and your staff tracking down misdirected e-mails. You may also need to maintain white and
black lists
for your anti-spam solution.
White lists
identify senders whose mail should always be treated as legitimate, whereas black lists identify senders whose mail should always be treated as spam. These lists override the determination that the anti-spam solution would make based on its own algorithms.

Harassment

Although e-mails with jokes and spiritual messages may seem innocent, they can easily cross the line and some may be seen as offensive or harassment. Your organization should have a clear-cut policy (from senior management, not from IT) that indicates a zero tolerance for any material (including e-mail) that can be construed as offensive on grounds of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and so on. It isn't uncommon for e-mail messages to be included as evidence in various types of litigation. One of “investor” Bernard Madoff's alleged co-investors was indicted using some of his firm's e-mails (
online.wsj.com/article/SB123903070566093099.html
). Work with your Legal and HR departments to define, if you haven't done so already, a clear e-mail policy.

Viruses

Although you should certainly educate your users about messages from unknown sources, a more aggressive posture is also called for. All your workstations and servers should run anti-virus software. In addition, you should have anti-virus software on your e-mail servers that scans messages and their attachments for viruses. Products from Trend Micro, Symantec, McAfee, among others, are relatively inexpensive for the protection they provide. Anti-spam and anti-virus solutions for e-mail are also available in the cloud as an SaaS offering (e.g., Google's Postini and Cisco's IronPort). See
Chapter 8, Security and Compliance
, on
page 205
for more information regarding viruses and how to defend against them.

Data Size and Retention

Because e-mail is so often used to distribute big files, such as large presentations and videos, as well as games and jokes, the amount of storage required to keep it all can be massive. As such, it isn't unusual to have a corporate policy that sets limits on the size of messages, the size of mailboxes, and the age of messages. These limitations are available with the most popular e-mail packages. It's important that users be made aware of these policies, and that the limits are set after considering users' needs.

Users should also be aware that size limits may be in effect regarding external users with whom they exchange mail. Be clear to your users that just because your company's e-mail size limit is large, that doesn't mean other companies have the same limit. As such, if you allow your users to send messages of a certain size, there is no guarantee that the message will get through since the recipient's mail environment could very well have a lower limit.

Appropriate Use

Just like with the use of the company phones, it's reasonable to expect that not every message your users send will be work-related. There will be an occasional personal message. Most organizations expect and tolerate this as long as they aren't oversized and don't contain offensive e-mails. However, it's wise to have a formal policy (just like the one that probably exists for use of the company phones) saying that e-mail is for work-related use only. Some organizations will explicitly state that some personal use of e-mail is okay, as long as it's limited, inoffensive, and so on. Similarly, most companies state that the e-mail environment, and its content, are owned by the company, and reserve the right to review e-mail messages that their employees send and receive. The company usually will only invoke that right, though, when a problem or policy violation is suspected.

Along these lines, many organizations automatically add disclaimers to any e-mail messages that are sent outside the company. These disclaimers often assert the confidentiality of the message. But, many industries (e.g., financial, legal) may add statements pertinent to their field.

E-mail Archiving

With regulatory requirements like
Sarbanes-Oxley
, HIPAA, along with discovery of electronic documents in litigation, finding and accessing specific e-mail messages is becoming a growing requirement. It's becoming increasingly common for the Legal department to contact IT and make a request such as “we need to find all the e-mails that anyone in the Comptroller's group sent or received during 2011 about the merger plans.”

Although that seems like a simple request to the Legal department, it's a monumental amount of work for IT. First, they'll need a list of everyone in that department (don't forget people that might have left during the year). The users' online mailboxes are of no use since they no longer contain the items that were deleted. So, the backup tapes have to be recalled, individually restored, and then searched. And, to do the search, someone in Legal is going to have to come up with a list of keywords that might indicate a message about merger plans.

Archiving solutions can greatly reduce the complexity of requests like the one used in this example. These solutions keep copies of all e-mails sent and received (based on rules you define), and they can easily be searched en masse. While the previous example could easily take week or months to fulfill with the restoration and search of backup tapes, the same request could be done within a few days using an archiving solution.

In addition to a sophisticated indexing and searching mechanism, archiving solutions rely on “single instance” storage to reduce the amount of storage required. For example, if HR sent an e-mail to all 1,000 employees, the archiving solution would recognize this and store only a single copy of it (and the same is true of attachments) in the archive.

Unified Messaging

Unified messaging is the term applied to integrating your voice mail and e-mail systems. In short, you can use your e-mail system to access your v-mail (messages appear in your inbox as audio files or as text using a speech-to-text solution) and use your v-mail system to access your e-mail (a synthesized voice reads your e-mail messages to you). Unified messaging can also allow you to send and receive faxes from your e-mail inbox and can greatly reduce the amount of paper associated with traditional faxing. This technology is just beginning to gain acceptance and is still maturing.