Email Archiving and Policy Management

Executive Summary

Overview
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a multi-campus university of global standing, with distinctive strengths in education and research, both of which include an entrepreneurial dimension. The NUS community comprises a cosmopolitan mix of more than 30,000 students from 88 countries and 7,000 faculty and staff at three campus locations. For students, faculty, and administrative staff email, which is overseen by the NUS Computer Centre, is the primary communications tool.

Barriers
The prior email solution at NUS included 10MB quotas for students and 50MB quotas for faculty and staff. Once end users reached their email quota, they could not receive or send email until they deleted email or moved the email into PST files. Students often resorted to using external third-party email systems with larger storage quotas. This was a concern for the Computer Centre team, as email contained IP-related content and files. For those who used NUS email, valuable time was spent managing PST files, time better spent conducting research, preparing teaching materials, and preparing for exams. In addition, with a newly implemented consolidated, tiered storage solution, the Computer Centre team sought an email archiving solution that would allow them to leverage less-expensive, secondary tier storage.

Solution
Working with Symantec Consulting Services, the Computer Centre team began rolling out an email archiving solution based on Symantec Enterprise Vault in January 2006. Full deployment was completed in October 2006. The team created email archiving policies, whereby email is archived from end-user desktops and laptops after 30 days or once 60 percent of the end-user’s 20MB quota has been reached. The solution leverages an EMC-based tiered-storage environment, which includes archiving to secondary tier EMC Centera disk arrays.

Benefits
A Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis of the NUS email archiving solution by The Alchemy Solutions Group pinpoints significant business value. More than US$3.1 million in cost savings, cost avoidance, and productivity improvements—realized and projected—will be achieved by December 2008 (starting in June 2006). The different areas of business value include:

• Elimination of PST File Management
• Avoidance of Microsoft Exchange Acquisitions
• IT Help Desk Productivity Improvements
• Finance Department Productivity Improvements
• Tiered Storage Avoidance
• Single-instance Archiving Cost Avoidance

The value of the solution extends beyond quantifiable results to qualitative benefits. Specifically, students and faculty, rather than spending valuable time managing PST files, are now able to focus on preparing for exams, developing teaching materials, and conducting research.