Johannesburg, 23 Sep 2005
Symantec has announced that Bowman Gilfillan, one of SA's largest corporate attorney firms, has selected Veritas Enterprise Vault, now from Symantec, to address the explosive growth in e-mail traffic that the company is experiencing, and the impact of this increase in traffic on its storage management facilities.
"E-mails need to be kept to meet the ever-growing demand for information and knowledge, to support the growth of our business," said Ken Davidson, Group IT Manager at Bowman Gilfillan.
"With over 400 employees, we realised these mails needed to be stored securely and efficiently to reduce risk in corporate litigation actions and to meet regulatory requirements on electronic document retention. It became increasingly important for our e-mails and corporate information to be both secure and available - an important balance for us to achieve."
As a result of the increased volume of e-mails that needed to be archived and as the Exchange message store grew in size, backups were taking longer, larger recovery windows were required and there was a large degradation in the performance of the e-mail system. "Continuing to buy storage was just not an option," says Davidson.
"After introducing quotas, we found users had begun using PSTs (personal stores), which used twice as much space, thus increasing storage costs. Furthermore, the locally stored PST files were not included in the daily backup routine and were also not suited to the incremental backup policy, in that when new messages were saved to a PST file, the entire file was backed up."
Bowman Gilfillan required a solution that would allow it to introduce rules that would automatically move e-mails out of the primary message store and into a storage vault.
"Removing messages from the primary message store reduces exchange administrative overheads and storage costs, as well as increasing the overall operational exchange efficiency," comments Craig Ricardo, director at i-Tech Business Systems, who was responsible for the implementation just over 18 months ago.
"With Enterprise Vault, e-mails are archived and replaced with shortcuts, ensuring easy access for end-users. The vaults themselves can be backed up incrementally, ensuring they do not extend the backup window and, as the vault does not contact active e-mails, the recovery window at Bowman Gilfillan can be extended."
The company chose to purchase Enterprise Vault Server Journaling, Mailbox and Policy Manager, as well as PST Migrator. Brett Samuel, sales engineer at Symantec, says these modules and solution packages have fully addressed Bowman Gilfillan's requirements.
"With the implementation of Enterprise Vault, the company has been able to remove the risks associated with PST storage and is now able to manage this more efficiently," says Samuel. "Additionally, using the search-and-discover functionality, Bowman Gilfillan can now access archived e-mails and other data objects that would normally have been difficult to find, in a matter of seconds."
Bowman Gilfillan's Davidson backs this statement up by saying that, in the past, the organisation would have no record of incoming or outgoing mail moved from the mail server to local personal folders, with the retention of these e-mails being entirely subject to the personal preference of users.
"Enterprise Vault has assisted in the legal compliancy of our storage of organisational information and has removed the risks associated with PST storage," he continues. "All incoming and outgoing e-mails are stored in a common repository, making our backup more efficient for long-term storage, as well as making data easily retrievable."
In addition to the solutions storage capabilities, the journaling function tracks and records all e-mail flow and allows users to easily retrieve archived mail. Thus, Enterprise Vault has assisted Bowman Gilfillan in achieving its immediate business aims as well as a significant number of those planned for the future.
Patrick Evans, regional director of Symantec South Africa, saluted this example of the growing importance of safeguarding data in expanding companies. "More and more companies are recognising the critical importance of keeping their data available, as well as secure. Symantec continues to work closely with partners and customers to ensure the integrity of information remains core to business development."
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