Email Archiving, Discovery, and Compliance

Executive Summary

Overview
Services from Procedo, Inc. help generate new efficiencies in the messaging environment and drive real value to the bottom line for its clients, including cost avoidance, labor savings, and productivity improvements. As part of its full-service strategy, Procedo maintains a strategic relationship with Symantec Corporation and leverages Symantec Enterprise Vault for enterprise messaging management solutions that address archiving, e-discovery, and compliance.

Barriers
When a major North American financial institution sought assistance in transforming its email environment, Procedo was chosen to lead the design and implementation of a solution based on Symantec Enterprise Vault. The initial implementation would include 6,500 users, but when two sister organizations later merged, another 89,000 potential users were added to the environment. The financial institution sought to address four distinct business and technology challenges.

First, it needed to improve its broker/dealer surveillance, regulatory compliance, and litigation discovery processes in order to avoid hefty fines and increase labor efficiencies. To accomplish this, it needed a solution that provided quicker and more effective access to requested information. Second, the current system was slow and light in functionality, data was distributed across multiple sites and servers, and evidentiary data was at risk of loss or corruption. Third, the company wanted better management and control of mail traffic and archiving, improved storage capabilities, and the elimination of cumbersome backup tapes. Finally, the client needed to secure its archive data from being accidentally over-written.

The Solution
Procedo assisted in the evaluation of alternative email infrastructures, and Symantec Enterprise Vault ranked highest among all contenders. The solution included the following Enterprise Vault agents and options: Discovery Accelerator, Compliance Accelerator, Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Archiving, and Microsoft Exchange Journaling. In phases from 2003 to 2005, the solution was deployed to the two organizations. All email is now stored in a searchable archive, enabling the company to respond faster and more efficiently to regulatory requests, audits, and litigation discovery demands. In particular, the company can better manage compliance surveillance, and users are able to conduct their own historical queries. In addition, the financial institution migrated to a new WORM storage technology platform to better secure data and to reduce storage costs, as well as consolidated 221 Microsoft Exchange servers to a one-to-one cluster of eight servers. The company is now able to efficiently manage extreme volumes of data, including an average of two million total messages per day and 1.3 billion records in the archive as of the beginning of 2007.

Benefits
The Alchemy Solutions Group identified six categories where Procedo is helping the financial institution to realize business value. First, with the new system, the time required to conduct open record searches for legal or regulatory purposes was slashed from 80 labor hours per search to a fraction of an hour for each. By eliminating thousands of hours of search time, the company is expected to realize more than $7 million in total e-discovery productivity savings though 2008. Second, with improved e-discovery capabilities, regulatory fines have been eliminated and roughly $8 million in cost avoidance is projected through 2008. Third, IT productivity improvements in email recovery will generate more than $1.3 million in savings through 2008. Fourth, the elimination of tape storage and handling costs will produce more than $6 million in savings through 2008. Fifth, email data compression created an immediate 50% cost savings in 2005, which translates into a projected savings of $1 million through 2008. Finally, through 2008, the financial institution will avoid nearly $3 million in server and IT salary costs due to improved server utilization.

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