The Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management.pdf

Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management contents] [ Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management 2 2 5 Developing an E-Mail Retention Policy Intelligent Archiving Helps Manage Corporate E-Mail Message Retention and Archiving Aid Corporate Governance Initiatives E-Discovery: Reducing the Cost of Review The Hidden Dangers of PST Files 5 7 7 9 9 11 11 1 ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management Developing an E-Mail Retention Policy By Lynn Haber D espite increasing concern about the considerable growth of corporate e-mail and its associated costs, most businesses have yet to protect themselves against the risks of non-compliance. In fact, according to industry watchers, most organizations do not have an e-mail retention policy, the foundation for minimizing risk, in place. While some companies may have paper-based document retention policies there’s a good chance they’re out of date, given that more than 90 percent of the documents organizations have coming in are electronic. More importantly, the bulk of these electronic documents never see print. Today’s regulatory and ediscovery climate dictates that no organization should leave good business policy to chance. Rethinking and implementing a solid e-mail retention policy, one that’s simple, automated, legally defensible, and ensures compliance, will ultimately save companies money, according to Mark Diamond, president and CEO of Contoural Inc., a technology consultancy in Mountain View, Calif. Over the past several years, the recognition of e-mail as a legitimate business record has taken center stage. Government and other industry regulators routinely request e-mail as part of court and regulatory proceedings. The need to produce e-mails for e-discovery requests in a timely manner was a major part of the revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took place in December 2006. Businesses are sitting up and taking notice. “Today, when we talk with customers about updating their retention policies, it’s less about how to deal with structured data in databases and more about the e-mail, messaging, and file servers,” says David Campbell, senior product marketing manager, Symantec Enterprise Vault. Get Going The daily headlines are full of reasons for businesses to revisit their messaging retention policies. Financial giants like Morgan Stanley and UBS have been fined for their failure to provide e-mails for discovery in the past. More recently, the White House admitted to investigators that as many as five million email messages were lost because the e-mail policy at the highest level of the U.S. government did not keep up with technology. Jupiterimages “Having a good e-mail retention policy is likely to save companies money in storage, e-discovery, and not having to settle lawsuits,” he says. The Radicati Group, a technology research company based in Palo Alto, Calif., expects the corporate messaging market to bring in $4 billion in revenue in 2011. 2 “A good retention policy for e-mails is important in litigation, regulatory compliance, and to know what employees are doing in terms of legal and compliance ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management risk,” says Diamond. In fact, unbeknownst to most organizations, is the fact that employees routinely save e-mails in .pst files, on USB drives, print them out, and even e-mail them home. It’s what Diamond calls the underground e-mail archive. “Many companies have 30-day e-mail retention/deletion because they’re looking to mitigate costs. In reality, such policies have the opposite effect because they increase discovery costs,” he says, noting that employees find ways around them. Companies must consider the drivers for retention policy development: • Compliance • Privacy issues • Litigation readiness and e-discovery • Business productivity and end-user liability • Cost At many organizations, compliance opens the discussion about e-mail archiving. That’s because compliance requires organizations to save certain types of documents. Compliance can be prescriptive or non-prescriptive. Regulatory compliance that’s prescriptive makes it clear for companies to understand what to save and how long to save it. Non-prescriptive compliance, in essence, is vague, as in "save anything thought to be bad." The second driver for formulating retention policy has to do with privacy, which also falls under the regulatory banner. “Regulations about privacy don’t have specifics, so companies have to be careful that if they’re saving e-mail and other documents that they have effective and appropriate security and expiration times,” says Diamond. Developing a retention policy is most influenced today by litigation readiness and e-discovery. While government regulatory compliance may affect some industries but not others, the FRCP sweeps a broad brush across businesses, in general. “When it comes to e-discovery what we’re finding is less concern that bad e-mails will come up, but rather, discovery defensibility, or will you have it and will you have it fast enough so as not to have sanctions,” says Diamond. 3 Of course, having a retention policy is worthless if it’s not consistent with employee work habits. A retention policy that’s not followed by employees will ultimately put companies at risk, as in the example of the underground archive. Finally, the fifth driver for retention policy is cost. Companies that fail to implement an e-mail retention policy will pay more for storage, e-discovery, and to settle lawsuits. Save It, Store It A good e-mail retention policy not only reduces risk but also meets business needs. The best approach, according to Diamond, is to save more and do it intelligently. “At the end of the day a good e-mail retention policy is as automated as possible so that it takes people out of the effort of doing manual classifications,” he says. A good automated retention policy and solution also allows information to be retrieved quickly and easily. Applying products such as Symantec’s Enterprise Vault 7.0 to the problem, for example, provides organizations with a platform that stores, manages, and enables discovery of corporate data from e-mail systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and content management and collaboration systems. Enterprise Vault also intelligently manages data to help protect corporate information while reducing costs. “Many of the companies we talk to either save everything or delete everything. Enterprise Vault allows companies to get to the middle of the spectrum, to hold critical e-mails and delete the rest,” says Symantec’s Campbell. Saving more is better than saving less, according to Diamond. A save-more electronic policy reduces liability, but also reduces litigation costs, avoids the consequences of failing to retain or produce documents, and avoids ancillary litigation about document retention policies and practices. An added benefit of a save-more policy is that it can drive good employee behavior and stop the underground archive. Additionally, if employees know that their business communication will be saved, they may be less likely to use e-mail to create inappropriate mes©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management sages in the first place, says Diamond. Developing a retention policy should not stop a company from deploying an archive solution today. “You don’t have to wait until a policy is in place to archive,” says Campbell. Companies can turn on a solution today, install it, get it up and running, and begin to capture data. “As the organization works through its retention policy you can easily pull it back, expire information that’s been captured, or expand policy and save information for longer periods of time,” he adds. The bottom line when it comes to retention policy development is that every company must have one. I Getting to Yes How do companies develop a retention policy that works? Building consensus among all the stakeholders is inherent to developing a solid retention strategy. Stakeholders include everyone in the company. At the same time, who owns a corporate retention policy tends to involve a committee that spreads across organizational departments such as legal, records management, IT, and security and compliance. “Policy development often takes weeks or months. A lot of the time, the committee isn’t always on the same page at the start, but over time you see convergence,” says Diamond. 4 ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management Intelligent Archiving Helps Manage Corporate E-Mail By Lynn Haber W hen it comes to electronic data discovery (e-discovery) the process at most organizations today is the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack. Explosive and uncontrolled growth of enterprise data, and e-mail in particular, continues to tax IT departments in terms of time and money spent for management and storage. More importantly, it has left most companies ill-prepared for litigation and investigation. From a risk and cost perspective alone, the case for email archiving is strong and is growing stronger every day as companies wake up to the fact that they might be the next litigation case just waiting to happen. Making the Case The numbers are overwhelming. Enterprise Strategy Group estimates that organizations will archive 7,000 petabytes of e-mail over the next four years alone. At what cost? All companies have a variety of e-mails ranging from noncritical (such as personal, newsletters, jokes, and sales promotions) to critical (such as business records, transactions, and correspondence with suppliers). Most likely there’s no need to save it all. "Save everything" strategies for the purpose of preparation and risk avoidance in case of an e-discovery event, while noble, are costly both on the front-end (storage) and back-end (e-discovery and Backup tapes remain the most common method when IT is asked to recover old email messages. A survey by Osterman Research found that only six percent of respondents could immediately and confidently handle e-discovery requests. It's important to remember that not all e-mail is created equal. There’s a mix of archived content ranging from junk to critical sitting in corporate e-mail stores. The challenge for IT and legal is to distinguish between the two. Intelligent archiving can help. Products such as Symantec Corp.’s Enterprise Vault 7.0 with intelligent archiving, for example, give control over mammoth email stores back to IT. Not only does intelligent archiving help companies judiciously identify e-mail content, but also helps organizations navigate a middle ground between “save everything” and “delete everything” policies. Jupiterimages legal review). In fact, the legal cost of review is recognized as the most expensive part of the e-discovery process. With legal review costs ranging from $50 to $200 per hour, depending upon location, the goal of any company is for the legal review of only relevant data. At the other end of the spectrum, companies that ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. 5 Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management delete e-mails within 30 days, for example, may reduce storage requirements and cut costs, but e-mails are likely to be duplicated on other data stores. Data is commonly duplicated multiple times within the organization. When it comes to archive, the goal is to save the critical e-mail and wipe out the rest. Organizations want to be able to classify and manage e-mail retention across different categories of information to reduce costs and manage risk. defensible records retention program by classifying all e-mail as each message is created or read by the user directly into Microsoft Outlook. So, for example, a window pops up on an e-mail and asks the user to identify the content—is it a record, is it junk—and then applies the appropriate retention policy. Retention and deletion rules are enforced and applied granularly across different classes of information. Policy enforcement, or saving relevant e-mails to archive and disposing of trivial e-mails, gives IT command over archive stores instead of allowing archive to snowball out of control. Intelligent archiving gives IT managers a new way to think about archive strategy. Rather than determine archive based on time or size limits, intelligent archive allows IT to consider archive based on content. The benefits of an intelligent archive strategy allow the business to decide what data it will save for a specified retention period based on set policy. As a result, longterm retention is more effective as classified and tagged data can be easily retrieved. Intelligent archiving is about intelligent storage, retention, and discovery: knowing where to most economically store data based on classification; determining the retention period for the data; and being able to search and retrieve data during an investigation or for e-discovery. Rather than simply investing in archive, the time has come for companies to invest in what goes into the archive. I A Better Way An intelligent archiving platform stores, manages, and enables the discovery of corporate data from e-mail systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and collaboration and content management systems. Products like Enterprise Vault utilize intelligent classification and retention technologies to capture, categorize, index, and store target data to enforce policies and protect corporate assets while helping to reduce storage costs and simplify management. Classification options include using automated classification, user-driven classification, or third-party -- i.e., records management -- approaches. The automated classification engine reduces archive size and search times by categorizing and retaining e-mail based on 50 predefined or an unlimited number of customizable rule types. For example, the automated engine may look for financial data within an e-mail message, tag it, and retain it according to retention policy. The user classification engine ensures a consistent and 6 ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management Message Retention and Archiving Aid Corporate Governance Initiatives By Lynn Haber G iven the growing trend in corporate governance, complex compliance requirements, and e-discovery, enterprises without an e-mail management (EMM) strategy may soon be accused of mismanagement. Why? Because the cost of not being proactive is too steep. sages for a defined period of time. It can be used independently or as part of a corporate records repository for legal and business uses. It can also be used as a solution to reduce the size of production e-mail data stores to gain operational efficiencies. If the management costs associated with the increasing glut of electric documents, in particular messaging, isn't enough reason for organizations to think about the benefit of getting a handle on EMM, corporate decision makers should focus their attention on corporate compliance and e-discovery as a motivator. The most stringent corporate compliance regulations fall on specific industries like healthcare and financial services. Corporate governance mandates like the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act have tentacles that are far more reaching. Passed six years ago after the collapse of Enron, its regulations were intended to provide accountability for accounting procedures. While undefined in the area of e-mail retention, the potential misinterpretation of what to save vs. what to delete can be a costly mistake. Corporate governance, compliance, and legal discovery (or ediscovery) should have businesses thinking about a messaging retention and archiving solution sooner than later. EMM, according to industry experts, can help mitigate risks, i.e., the hefty fines or penalties for delays in recovering e-mail content, associated with regulatory compliance and corporate governance. EMM is the process of applying traditional, paper-based, records retention management processes to the digital world without compromising business productivity. According to Gartner, an e-mail active archiving product provides a searchable archive of all e-mail mes- Times are Changing The growing importance of archiving mirrors the increasing number of government compliance mandates that are forcing organizations to retain critical records for years. Here, for example, are some key compliance laws and regulations by industry, according to Osterman Research: Jupiterimages • Financial: SEC 17a; NASD 3010; HIPAA; SOX; GLBA; SB1386; among others • Healthcare: HIPAA; SOX; SB1386; among others • Government: HIPAA; among others • Life Sciences: HIPAA; 21 CFR11; SOX; SB1386; among others • Other industries: HIPAA; SOX; SB1386; among others Perhaps two of the more far-reaching compliance regu©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. 7 Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management lations to come down the pike are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and SOX. HIPAA, for example, not only applies to firms providing healthcare services, but also to health insurance providers, claims processing services, and employers that provide health services or that are self-insured. SOX applies to all organizations that report financial statements publicly or that issue U.S.-traded securities. Additionally, private companies that do business with publicly traded companies must also follow SOX guidelines so they can deliver requested information in the event a client is audited. Privately held companies with aspirations of being acquired by a public company are advised to adhere to SOX guidelines as well. Other government laws to consider are The PATRIOT Act and Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, which require organizations to retain and maintain records so they're available when regulators ask for them. The second critical trend driving the increased need for businesses to have systems and procedures in place for e-mail retention and management is litigation and ediscovery. Not only must organizations retain critical data, but they must also be able to extract data for the purpose of legal discovery and do it quickly. According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), businesses open themselves up to critical risk if they're unable to meet regulatory mandates or e-discovery requests. For example, ESG estimates that it costs an internal IT department between $1,500 and $3,000 to process and restore a single back-up tape. In an instance where an organization is required to respond to a litigious claim, IT can expect to pay two to three times as much to process a single tape. management and archiving solution, with the costs of recovering archived e-mail from a tape-based archive and found the difference dramatic. More specifically, the research firm found that organizations could realize more than $800,000 in benefits when deploying an integrated messaging archival system. The benefits range from avoiding compliancerelated fines to improving utilization of storage resources that support the archive, according to ESG. ING Investment Management Group LLC, the U.S.based division of Dutch ING Group, manages more than $475 billion in investments for institutional clients, fund distributors, and other ING units. It found its disparate network and communications systems were difficult to manage, making it hard for the company to meet increasingly complex compliance requirements. Five years ago, ING had three separate e-mail systems and multiple phone systems, directories, and Microsoft Windows NT4 domains, as well as 575 servers with direct attached storage. The company also faced 100 percent annual growth in e-mail data. Mark Kolodzej, ING’s vice president of IT and head of the infrastructure services department, developed a long-term strategy to consolidate and standardize every aspect of the company’s technical infrastructure. The Symantec Enterprise Vault platform allowed ING to bring all its data management back in-house. The company is able to classify, isolate, and retrieve data more efficiently, speeding up its e-discovery and data mining efforts. Users no longer have size limits on their mailboxes, and the company doesn’t need to move archived e-mail from the Microsoft Exchange server to PST files for retention. Since deploying the software, the company can process e-discovery requests 80 percent faster than before, enabling IT staff to spend their time on other priorities. Enterprise Vault also reduces the risk associated with inaccurate or incomplete discovery in response to legal or regulatory action. Before implementing Enterprise Vault, it could take up to three weeks to respond to each discovery request, said Kolodzej. Now it takes two to three days, which equates to more than $70,000 in annual savings for ING. I ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Take Action While still a young market, message management and archiving is becoming a strategic IT component that most companies can't afford not to address. Industry analysts have recognized Symantec Enterprise Vault as a leading solution for applications such as data collection, corporate governance, and legal protection. In fact, ESG compared Enterprise Vault and EMC's Centera, a combined integrated disk-based e-mail 8 Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management E-Discovery: Reducing the Cost of Review By Lynn Haber T here’s been no shortage of headlines in the business press regarding the reality, risks, and costs associated with electronic discovery (e-discovery). Less publicized, however, are the underlying reasons why corporations incur such enormous costs when involved in an e-discovery event, and more importantly, how companies can reduce the cost of review. tapes and PCs, attorneys must actually review the data," says David Campbell, senior product marketing manager for Enterprise Vault at Symantec Corp. The hard costs companies incur for e-discovery are staggering. Industry experts report that organizations typically spend at least $2 million to $4 million in legal discovery costs for every billion dollars in sales. On the flip side, fines and penalties for failing to produce sufficient electronic documentation in an e-discovery event have ranged from the millions of dollars to the billions of dollars. Improving the efficiency of ediscovery review and, ultimately, lowering associated costs will only happen when IT takes the lead and puts in place the processes, policies, and applications to make it happen. Jupiterimages The simple fact is that the days of the legal department sifting through file cabinets and memos with pencil and paper are over. E-mails and electronic document files, customer records, financial statements, and digitized data stores are the corporate reality of the day. The question for today’s business executives is how prepared the company will be to meet the challenges of the ediscovery process when, not if, litigation comes knocking on the door. Being prepared means taking a proactive approach to e-discovery—not tomorrow but today. Companies must not only develop and nurture a new and deeper rapport between the CIO and legal counsel, but IT must broaden its role to help reduce the volume of documents to be reviewed by legal in response to an e-discovery event. "Legal review of electronic documents is a major expense in e-discovery costs. Once IT locates mass quantities of electronic files stored on disk, backup Imperative for Change According to a survey by Litigation Trends, almost 90 percent of U.S. corporations are engaged in some type of litigation, with the average company balancing a docket of 37 lawsuits. These figures indicate there’s no free pass for businesses when it comes to experiencing an e-discovery event. Businesses seem to be getting the message when it comes to archiving and e-discovery. According to IDC, the archiving software market was worth $1 billion 9 ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management worldwide in 2007 and it was growing at a rate of 18.4 percent year-over-year. In order for companies to control e-discovery costs, they must understand what drives them. No longer a lone rider in what has evolved from discovery to e-discovery, the legal department now depends on the IT department to gather evidence in the form of e-mails, spreadsheets, database information, voicemails, and other electronic data. But IT’s role in the e-discovery process can’t be limited to that of an indiscriminate gatherer of data. Working together, IT and legal must formally plan and improve e-discovery processes and policies with the goal of whittling down what may otherwise end up being millions of files and e-mails for legal review to only those most relevant to a particular e-discovery event. When faced with producing electronic records the challenge for IT is huge. Electronic files must be located, sorted, reviewed, and prepared as evidence. In any given IT shop files may exist in multiple places, i.e., application servers, storage systems, backup media, desktops, and laptops, to name a handful. Then there’s the equally if not more complex task of locating and identifying relevant e-mails. A quick reminder of the scope of the e-mail epidemic: According to Ferris Research, 25 billion e-mail messages are sent daily, and of those 7.5 billion are sent to corporate e-mail users. Defining policies and procedures can also limit risk. IT and legal call the shots when it comes to identifying and preserving electronic information, not the end user. CIO Robert Taylor was also concerned about the need to reduce costs through e-mail archiving and e-discovery to meet the Georgia Open Records Act and compliance with other government regulations, as well as for e-mail restore requests. Fulton County IT is responsible for about 7,000 government employees. The county itself is among the 40 largest metropolitan areas in the nation, encompassing 11 cities including Atlanta. Fulton County’s IT department delivers public services to 915,000 residents. To centralize e-mail archiving, e-discovery, and retrieval across the 42 departments of Fulton County, it implemented Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, which allowed Taylor to leverage the product’s time-based archiving policies. The county also deployed several Enterprise Vault business accelerators, and later added the Discovery Accelerator to provide e-discovery capabilities and extended Enterprise Vault to include eFax and VoIP search capabilities. Averaging eight open record requests per month (approximately 96 per year), primarily from e-mail archives, the county reports that by leveraging the Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator option, both management and IT productivity has greatly improved. By reducing the search time for open records requests from days to minutes, the county expected to realize more than $257,000 in IT labor cost savings alone in the fourth quarter of 2007. Annual savings in IT labor costs are estimated to be almost $112,000. Looking at the archiving components for fulfilling open records requests and providing end users with selfrestore capabilities, Fulton County is realizing $1,639,000 in cost savings over a period of three and a half years. The bottom line is that when it comes to e-discovery, companies must act now or pay later. Think of e-discovery as becoming the cement in a relationship between IT and legal that began with the increasing depth and breadth of regulatory compliance. I Better Information Management An internal study conducted by DuPont, in responding to discovery requests over a three-year period found that more than 50 percent of the documents reviewed were kept beyond the required retention period. The cost to review those documents: $12 million. E-mail and document archiving combined with record retention policies that reflect a company’s particular legal and regulatory requirements, for example, can limit duplication and the overabundance of copies that live on multiple machines, as well as the length of time information is retained. Bottom line: reduce review costs. 10 ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management The Hidden Dangers of PST Files By Lynn Haber T he increasing importance of being able to search, retain, and retrieve enterprise e-mail is being undermined by wrong-headed attempts to treat PST files, also known as personal folders, locally. The ultimate outcome of such practices is that companies create more problems than they solve and unnecessarily put the business at risk. Savvy companies, however, are recognizing the benefits of a central archive and are eliminating their reliance on PST files altogether. server; stored on a hard drive that resides on a users desktop or laptop computer; is burned to CDs or DVDs; or is moved to a portable storage device such as a USB drive. These actions exemplify good intentions gone wrong. There are many costs and risks associated with this type of PST file management that pertain to storage, legal discovery, and administration. One of the first problems created when e-mail from Exchange is moved into PST files for retention is that companies drive archiving underground. In this case, underground means out of sight. Companies are in the dark about how many files exist and what information is contained in the files. Is it precious intellectual property? Jupiterimages PST file archives have other problems as well. For starters, this practice puts records into disparate silos or folder files making it difficult for IT to store, find, and manage. There’s also a propensity for data corruption with limited recovery capability that ultimately results in permanent data loss. An all-too-common scenario for dealing with corrupt PST files is that users call on IT support to save the file. Tech support resources cost companies time and money whether it’s to rebuild a corrupted file or go to the organization’s tape backup to retrieve a file, if possible. When it comes right down to it PST files are a bad idea. A mission-critical application, e-mail commonly contains a wide range of vital corporate data such as personal data, customer data, product plans, marketing plans, corporate financial data, intellectual property, and more. Therefore, robust management of these files is essential. In a nutshell, PST files were not designed for the enterprise class workout they’re getting. And policies that minimize the importance of PST files, and the resulting impact on the business of not dealing with them properly, can be severe. The Problem In an attempt to better manage growing volumes of email, administrators and/or users do one or more of the following to move subsets of their mailbox data out of the e-mail system and onto other storage devices: data is moved into a PST file, which can be stored on a file 11 ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Guide to E-Mail Archiving and Management From a storage perspective, PST files break apart the notion of single instancing. For example, if a group of employees are copied on the same e-mail that has a PowerPoint attachment and archive to PST, the company ends up saving a lot of redundant data. This not only eats up precious storage resources but also drives up storage costs. There's also a negative impact on nightly backups, as the archive bit for any opened file will be changed, and thus require a complete file backup even if the file has only been viewed. Both underground archiving and search limitations around PST files, mentioned earlier, have a serious impact on legal discovery and compliance. The spotlight on e-mail as the core of litigation should have every company worried about PST files in the organization. When it comes to e-discovery, information contained in PST files falls under compliance management as does e-mail on an Exchange server. Underground archiving may cause a company to miss e-mail discovery during a search and puts the organization at risk. Organizations also may also increase legal liability due to the limited ability to search PST files; a user can only search one PST file at a time, making it almost impossible for an organization to locate and search all PST files for compliance and/or discovery. The bottom line is that PST files add to the risk, cost, and burden of litigation discovery. The manually intensive process of sifting through e-mails to identify for legal holds takes both time and money, and given the ad-hoc nature of PST files this creates pockets of unchecked data. At the same time, from an administrative viewpoint, PST files keep organizations from safely identifying and destroying documents that no longer need to be kept for legal or business reasons. PST files stored on local hard drives or removable storage media are difficult to administer. For example, a laptop that is lost or stolen can compromise an organization resulting in both tactical damages as well as brand damages. PST files into a central archiving repository. Businesses can use Symantec’s Enterprise Vault tools, for example, to conquer locally stored PST files and historical data. For the long-term management of e-mail archives the vendor offers a multi-step process: • Locate PST files by searching the network to look for the PST file extension and crawl files on laptop devices. • Once files are found, information can be collected into a central location. • Once in the archive, files can be indexed and ownership reassigned. This enables users to access the files and go back and delete any copies off of other data stores. E-mail is the primary form of communication at The National University of Singapore (NUS), one of the leading research universities in Asia. The more than 30,000 students send more than 550,000 every day, and the amount of e-mail stored grows by 10 percent a year, stressing the university's storage infrastructure. Students frequently exceeded the 10MB limits set on their e-mail inboxes, and couldn’t send or receive new messages until they deleted some old ones or archived them into .pst files. This prevented them from communicating with instructors and classmates, not to mention receiving bills and fee updates from NUS’s finance department. Moreover, students were turning to Webbased, third-party e-mail solutions, exposing NUS to security threats. Working with Symantec Consulting Services, Tommy Hor, the director of the university’s computer center, opted for an archiving solution based on Symantec Enterprise Vault. Each student gets a 20MB e-mail inbox, plus up to one GB of e-mail archive storage (50MB and 10GB, respectively, for faculty). Quotabased archiving functionality in Enterprise Vault allows the NUS team to configure inboxes so that e-mail more than 30 days old is automatically moved to the tier-two EMC Centera storage platform. End users can easily access archived e-mail via Microsoft Outlook. Through single-instance archiving, the Enterprise Vault solution has achieved at least 30 percent data compression, letting NUS avoid about $206,000 in storage technology acquisition through the end of 2008. The more flexible, automated e-mail policy is also creating large productivity gains. I ©2008, Jupitermedia Corp. Change Something There is a solution to the menace, liability, and risk that PSTs impose on the enterprise: migrate or eradicate 12