Email and Document Archiving, Email and Compliance

Executive Summary

Overview
ING Investment Management Americas, LLC. is the U.S. investment arm of Amsterdam-based ING Group, one of the world’s largest financial services companies. It provides investment management services to other business units within ING Group. Because of this central role, ING Investment Management must ensure that its IT operations are reliable, secure, and scalable to support the larger corporate objectives.

Barriers
ING Investment Management’s infrastructure was fragmented. Each of the company’s three main locations had its own email application, directory service, and phone system. Demonstrating compliance with government regulations and responding to discovery requests were eating up staff time and incurring outside costs, putting a drag on operations and profitability. Knowledge sharing and decision-making were hampered by information silos within the IT infrastructure, and the company had no comprehensive business continuity plan in place. In sum, maintaining a strong competitive profile dictated that ING Investment Management minimize costs within the IT organization while ensuring the highest possible level of worker productivity.

The Solution
In order to address the above challenges, ING Investment Management embarked on a major IT initiative designated as Atlas, which included, among other elements, consolidation of a silo-based, disparate storage environment. Working with the Network Appliance (NetApp) Global Services team, the ING Investment Management team designed and implemented a storage area network (SAN) based on NetApp hardware and software. The next-generation storage infrastructure is configured in three tiers, with data allocated to a specific tier based on its criticality.

On a related issue, as part of the larger Atlas initiative, the team also identified email and document archiving, e-discovery, and compliance as critical areas to address. They worked with Symantec Global Services to deploy a solution based on Symantec Enterprise Vault, which includes Compliance Accelerator, Microsoft Exchange Journaling, and File System Archiving options. Archiving policy covers email, instant messaging, file and print server data, and Bloomberg Professional IM. More recently, Symantec Global Services worked with the ING Investment Management team to migrate their instant messaging environment over to Symantec IM Manager from a competitive solution.

Benefits
The Alchemy Solutions Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis and identified eight primary areas where ING Investment Management has realized or is projected to realize business value from its IT transformation.

• PST File Management: $7,608,594 in savings by eliminating the need for using PST files to store data
• File System Archiving: $2,308,950 in cost savings through storing data more efficiently and recapturing storage space, and driving overall efficiency improvements
• Server and Labor Cost Avoidance: $10,102,188 in savings realized by consolidation of file servers and adoption of a tiered-storage strategy
• Single-instance Archiving and Tiered Storage: $677,188 in cost savings due to the compression of both emails and file and print data and adoption of a tiered-storage strategy
• Microsoft Exchange Server and Labor Cost Avoidance: $715,000 cost avoidance by deferring server costs and the IT personnel to support them
• Email Restoration by IT Help Desk: $289,299 in IT labor savings associated with end-user email restoration
• Regulatory e-Discovery Requests: $238,199 in reduced costs for more efficient processes now in place to comply with regulatory agency requests
• e-Discovery Process Improvement: $260,731 in cost savings as a result of less time spent organizing information requests

For more information on Alchemy Group or to download this document, go to http://www.alchemygroupinc.com/category/research/bva/