16 CIO Digest April 2008

Yesterday’s solution is today’s problem. Take email, for in-stance. It has become so use-ful that there’s now too much

of it. Storing, controlling, and search-ing through email is diffi cult. And it has become the focus of increasingly cumbersome compliance and litiga-tion requests.

The same is true for documents, instant messages, and Microsoft Share-Point data. In the digital era, informa-tion is multiplying faster than anyone expected. The little coastal fi shing village of information that IT teams managed years ago is rapidly trans-forming into a Shanghai of data. IT teams need a “regional plan”: a set of tools and policies that control the growth of information and make it serve people rather than hinder or bury them.

Some companies are managing the sprawl successfully and thriving. Five common tactics stand out.

Clear the wayEmail is a tool for the present. But email servers tend to be choked with data from the past. Archiving old mes-sages and data allows email servers to perform the way they were intended.

Absa Bank Limited is an example. It’s one of South Africa’s largest fi nan-cial services organizations, and its 36,000 employees process 60 million emails a month. Finding a way to con-trol this avalanche fell to Mark Uren, enterprise architect for Absa Group IT and leader of a team designing the fi rm’s enterprise content management strategy. “We reviewed a number of archiving solutions and wanted one that gave us great fl exibility in setting up archiving policies,” he says. “We chose Symantec Enterprise Vault.” Deployment to all email accounts is about half-complete.

The fi rst job for the new solution was to act as a bulldozer, clearing old

By Alan Drummer

Define

“Retentive”Email and Document Policy Management

SOLUTIONS FEATURE

“Retentive”

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email off the servers. After a 30 to 45 day archiving period, messages are now automatically archived to second tier storage, and, in the pro-cess, Enterprise Vault compresses and deduplicates them. As a result, according to Uren, “We’re project-ing a 55 percent reduction in email space requirements once we bring all our archiving policies online. That will reduce a 34 terabyte email store to about 15 terabytes.”

Across the Indian Ocean from South Africa in Australia QR Ltd. is no stranger to heavy loads. It operates Queensland Rail, manag-ing 1,000 trains a day carrying 160,000 passengers and 445,000 tons of freight. Meanwhile, the company’s 14,000 employees have accumulated 95 million messages in a six terabyte email store.

“We just couldn’t let the repository grow and grow,” says the company’s CIO Dallas Stower. “We needed a way to manage the whole information lifecycle and move data off high-availability storage. Our second-tier storage is 20 to 30 percent less expensive per gigabyte.”

QR also uses SAP applications extensively and archives SAP data using ArchiveBridge, the SAP agent for Enterprise Vault. “We need to retain SAP informa-tion for up to seven years, but the historical SAP data just slows down performance,” says Stower. “Archiving lets us migrate the his-torical data to second-tier storage, while making it searchable and retrievable.”

Inova Health System, based in Northern Virginia, is another organization that is using archiving to control email growth. It has 9,100 email users generating about two million emails a month, and it used Enterprise Vault to move about four terabytes of older messages into a two tera-byte archive, with 750 gigabytes of messages remaining on its mail servers. “We’ve been able to handle 100 percent annual growth

in email without adding email servers at $30,000 each,” says John Underhill, director of IT.

Map what’s thereThe flood of email does more than drive up storage costs. It has left many organiza-tions uncertain about what infor-mation is present and where it can be found.

These risks are heightened by PST files created when employees try to stay under mailbox size limits. These files are prone to loss and corruption, aren’t searchable, and complicate compliance and e-Discovery.

Once their contents are cap-tured, they can be eliminated. To accomplish this, Inova used the PST Migrator option of Enterprise Vault, migrating the files into the archive repository and make their contents searchable and secure. “We then banned further use of the format and got out of the PST business,” Underhill notes.

QR has taken the same steps. And Absa also plans to eradicate PSTs, though Uren estimates that Absa’s 36,000 employees may have generated 50 terabytes worth. “We need to sort out the PST files first—there are many that won’t be worth archiving,” says Uren.

When Enterprise Vault archives email, it indexes the full text of messages and attach-ments. It can also archive and index other forms of unstruc-tured data, including documents, instant messages, and Microsoft SharePoint data.

With a fully-indexed archive, enterprise-wide searches are

easier. The result is improved corporate memory and addi-tional return on the investment a company makes in acquiring knowledge. Inova’s Underhill offers an example: “Inova tends to attract and keep people for years—for decades, even. Right now we’re doing a major facil-ity upgrade, and we’re able to go back years and recover com-munications with our vendors because of our archive. We can look up time lines and cost esti-mates and optimize our propos-als, helping us make smarter decisions.”

But a message can’t be search if it’s been deleted—unless there’s a policy that all incoming and outgoing messages are routinely copied in order to make compli-ance and e-Discovery easier. This

“Retentive”

75 million: Pages reviewed by DuPont for discovery requests in a three-year period50 percent: Portion of reviewed docu-ments that had been kept past their retention period$12 million: Cost of reviewing docu-ments kept past their retention period

Source: “Building an ROI Business Case for Email Archiving”, Redgrave Daley Ragan & Wagner LLP, 2006.

What’s at Stake?

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Mark Uren, Enterprise Architect, Absa Group IT

18 CIO Digest April 2008

policy can be enforced using the “journaling” feature of Enterprise Vault. Inova has turned this feature on so that “there’s no question that we have everything if there’s any concern from a user, legal, or HR perspective,” says Underhill. Absa also uses jour-naling to ensure its “information map” is complete.

Use “GPS” to get to what you need, fastLitigation requests concerning email are usually costly and dif-ficult to fulfill. What’s needed is a way to automate and simplify them. Some organizations are using an Enterprise Vault option called Discovery Accelerator. It’s similar to GPS in that it can quickly search through a large

database, pinpoint what’s needed, and make it easy to reach.

Says Absa’s Uren: “Discovery using tape used to take us days or weeks. Now with Discovery Accelerator, we can get what we need with the push of a button. In an organization our size, we continually have audit activity going on. Discovery Accelerator

empowers the audit or legal teams to conduct the search by themselves, without IT help, saving the IT team significant time.”

AgFirst Farm Credit Bank has a similar challenge. The company, based in Columbia, South Carolina, provides funding and finan-cial services for 23 farmer-owned financial coop-eratives in 15 eastern states and Puerto Rico. Over the past

year and a half, requests for the retrieval of email from historical backups have increased. “We found we could more effectively serve those requests cost-effectively with e-Discovery, avoiding the drain on our resources,” says Robert Zeman, vice president of Information Technology Management.

Zeman’s Director of IT Opera-tions and Technical Services, Chad Toney, describes the manual process as cumbersome and time-consuming: Because we’ve used three or four versions of Microsoft Exchange over the years, it could potentially take a week just to set up the right email environment for restoration, then longer to actually recover, search through, and export the data.”

He continues: “Late this year, we plan to turn the Discovery Accelerator feature of Enterprise Vault over to legal departments in our 23 customer associations and empower them to perform their own discovery—thus elimi-

nating the need for AgFirst tech-nicians to perform the retrievals. Additionally, this empowerment to the customers to perform their own necessary retrievals keeps things where they belong and ensures confidentiality.”

Inova is already gaining the benefits of streamlining e-Discovery. “Before Enterprise Vault, fulfilling legal requests could take a month or more and easily cost over $100,000,” Underhill says. “When Enterprise Vault returns results quickly, it pays for itself with each legal discovery.”

Create law and orderAnother benefit of an archive is that once it’s created, organiza-tions can lay down the law about what will be kept and how it will be treated. But to do that, for example, they need to have the ability to manage policies central-ly, and apply them with granular-ity, so that they can differ depend-ing on department, class of user, or type of message. Organizations that can do this can achieve many types of business gains.

Absa is one example. It has 45 business units, from mortgage loans to retail banking to credit cards, and each business unit is presenting its own archival requirements to the IT team so that custom archival policies can be developed. The policies will be enforced by Enterprise Vault, the bank’s archiving tool, and they will help the bank comply with regulations from England, the United States, and South Africa— a list lengthened by the fact that Absa is owned by Barclays Bank.

Absa has chosen two approaches to enforcing compliance policies. One is user-driven classification. Uren explains: “We use Enterprise Vault to enable users to right-click a message and choose whether it’s business-related, operations-relat-ed, or compliance-related. In the credit area, for instance, a user can designate that a message is from a business banking customer and

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Symantec Enterprise Vault provides a software-based intelligent archiving platform that stores, manages, and enables discovery of corporate data. > The Automated Classification

Engine option extends EnterpriseVault to include intelligent contentbased categorization and tagging ofemail.

> The Compliance Accelerator option enables easy, cost-effectivesupervisory review of email toensure compliance with regulatorybodies such as NASD.

Defining the Symantec Retention Solution

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John Underhill, Director of IT, Inova

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falls under South Africa’s National Credit Act. This ensures it will be stored in compliant fashion.”

The other approach to enforc-ing compliance is to use auto-mated rules during the process of archiving. Notes Uren: “We have a number of policies executed by Enterprise Vault. One of them is that email with an attach-ment goes through additional automated screening because it’s a potentially more important record.” QR has a similar rule. “A message with a two megabyte or greater attachment is archived after only seven days, because it’s likely to be more important, and because this early archiving reduces pressure on mailbox quotas,” QR’s Stower explains. “All other messages are archived after 28 days.”

Determining appropriate archiv-ing policies for compliance is a very involved process and requires organizations to perform in-depth due diligence, explains AgFirst’s Toney. “Our legal department leads our compliance effort, and it met with all our lines of business to establish corporate retention poli-cies by assessing information and setting retention periods to satisfy corporate and regulatory needs. Although anticipated to take sev-eral months, it required more time than we’d projected.”

Inova avoids many compliance issues by using email to transmit business information only—the emailing of health information is not permitted. Patient data in email is scanned, detected, and stopped at the firewall level, and if the sender insists on emailing it, encryption must be used.

Inova also has a policy that makes archiving voluntary. “Users can create individual archives using Enterprise Vault,” Inova’s Underhill explains. “We also tell them that after six months, anything in their mail-boxes that is not archived will be deleted. We made archiving voluntary because our 9,100 users have a wide range of needs.

Some are power users who want to save every-thing, while some are novice users who aren’t interested. We support both options.”

Take out the garbageOnce an organization has mapped informa-tion, it can get rid of what is no longer need-ed—minimizing cost and risk. What’s required is a tool for automating information lifecycle management.

AgFirst considered different periods for retention for email. After extensive analysis by their compliance officer they adopted a two year retention peri-od policy with exception of one customer affiliate that desired a retention period of five years. “We will set Enterprise Vault to purge messages based on the adopted retention periods, mak-ing the discovery process much simpler as we improve operational efficiency. Until our system migra-tion is complete, we’ll continue to retrieve needed historical email by utilizing backup tapes. That means during discovery we have to go back as far as we can, pulling tapes from Iron Mountain. Once we can attest that everything be-yond the retention period is gone, we’ll have minimized risk. We’ll be able say that we don’t have older data on CD or in a PST file on someone’s desktop.”

QR also uses Enterprise Vault to separate the information it must keep for compliance from the information it can eliminate much sooner. Says Stower: “We’re able to manage the cost and efficiency of our storage, yet at the same time enable users to access the informa-tion they need and pull it back from non real-time storage.”

Absa’s Uren sums up a benefit for archiving that holds true for

many organizations. “Our first priority is to our customers,” he says. “Email archiving is enabling us to be ahead of our competition in being able to assure customers we are compliant. It gives custom-ers added confidence. We can cat-egorize, classify, and search their emails more effectively, letting us also provide a bet-ter customer experience. And internally, in cost efficiency and responsiveness, we’re real-izing tremendous gains.”

The result is the transformation of an information “sprawl” into a managed “ecosystem”—where people and information can grow and work together as intended, in a sustainable fashion. n

Alan Drummer is Creative Director for Content at NAVAJO Company (www.navajoco.com). His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Fran-cisco Examiner, Create Magazine, and on The History Channel.

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PodcastHear more from the author by checking out the podcast at go.symantec.com/drummer_1

Robert Zeman (right), Vice President of the Information Management Group, and Chad Toney (left), Director of IT Operations and Technical Services, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank