Humans are packrats by nature. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the way many small and medium sized businesses deal with their email, as they indiscriminately save overflow to their Exchange Server. The problem is that Exchange wasn't designed to be a large-scale storage database – and it definitely wasn't designed to be the repository for years’ worth of email messages and related documents. 

According to Osterman Research, the average knowledge worker sends and receives 120-124 email messages each day, which equates to 10 to 16MB each day. Multiply that by the number of employees, and you get the idea – the size of email databases has become an enormous issue. The challenge for SMBs is to find a place where all this data can be secure, easily retrievable, and easy to manage. 

Here are two common ways SMBs are dealing with this growing amount of messaging data:

• Add storage as needed: Some businesses simply continue to keep adding more disks for storage as needed. Since the abundance of messaging data is a growing problem, this route requires IT to constantly buy more and more storage to appease the situation. And this data must be backed up – at least daily. Not only that, but as message stores get larger, the backup takes longer. However, SMBs cannot afford the risk that missing a backup window would present, because it would open the data up to possible loss or exposure. Adding storage as needed is a costly way to deal with the problem – and it creates an unwieldy situation to manage.
• Store as PST files: Many SMBs use quotas to manage message server growth. Once the pre-set message quotas are reached in Exchange, the oldest files that no longer fit are then stored offline on the user’s computer in PST format inside a Personal Folder. For example, if a business sets a 100MB quota, an employee that reaches that maximum will not be able to send or receive messages until room is made for new messages. This is done by dragging messages into PST files – a time consuming task. In fact, Osterman also estimates that knowledge workers spend on average 60 minutes per week managing email (above and beyond simple sending and receiving). There are many problems with relying on PST files for messaging storage. One is the loss of control. Once the file is put into a PST file, it is only stored locally on the user’s machine and is therefore out of the IT and company’s control. Storing email as PST files also makes it very difficult to recover specific messages, which is a real problem in e-discovery situations, when a business is required to produce a specific email for legal reasons. Also, PST files are unreliable, and inherently unstable. This results in a greater risk of corrupted or lost files, and increased calls to the helpdesk, wasting everyone's time. Finally, storing messages as PST files will ultimately lead to a storage consumption dilemma, as PST files can take up around 1-2GB of space each. The problems that result bring us back to the dilemma IT managers cannot seem to get away from: as messaging data grows, where will I put it all, and how can I manage it all?

A better solution
Symantec Enterprise Vault can help SMBs looking for a way out of the email storage conundrum. Enterprise Vault is a software-based archiving platform that resides next to the email server and provides intelligent archiving for messages. For instance, SMBs can set retention policies that dictate what messages to keep, how long to keep them (for a set amount of time or indefinitely), what can and cannot be modified, etc. Setting retention policies will reduce the size and number of messages to be stored, which results in less overall volume to manage and less message store size required. Policies can also be set so messaging is archived in accordance with business, legal, and regulatory mandates now and in the future.

Enterprise Vault is transparent to the user in many ways – quotas are invisible and irrelevant to the employees using email. To find an archived message, users simply look inside their Outlook application as they would a regular email message. IT can set up policies that state if a user hits 90% of his or her mail quota for example, archiving automatically starts to make room for incoming messages, which is transparent to the user. 

By reducing a SMB's online message store by about 50-75%, Enterprise Vault makes faster backup of Exchange possible. To do this, SMBs set archiving policies based on the age of messages in the mail store – if a message is older than three months, for example, it moves to the archive. Archiving in this manner will lighten the load placed on Exchange and help it perform better. 

An added benefit for SMBs that have historically saved all email in PST files is Enterprise Vault's PST migration utility, which finds and brings all messages previously stored as PSTs back under IT control.

The messaging storage pains that most SMBs suffer now far outweigh the costs and benefits associated with a better solution. The reality is that email stores are growing by the day, and too many SMBs are utilizing a patchwork system to deal with the problem. Enterprise Vault can help SMBs manage the massive growth in their email systems with intelligent storage, a seamless interface, and easier management.

Learn more about creating efficiencies through archived messages

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Symantec Enterprise Vault

Mailbox Management for Domino Users
Extending Enterprise Vault with E-Discovery Connectors to support the E-Discovery Reference Model (Webcast)

Enterprise Vault, the industry leader in email and content archiving, enables users to store, manage, and discover unstructured information across the organization.  Using a market proven architecture, Enterprise Vault provides an open, intelligent and manageable approach to improve management, reduce costs and control information risk. With unstructured information consuming a large percentage of storage, Enterprise Vault archives information from messaging, file servers and collaborative systems using powerful storage optimization, classification and retention technologies.  Enterprise Vault will automatically capture, categorize, index and enforce retention policies and secure unstructured information while reducing storage costs and simplifying management. 

• Optimized Single-Instance-Storage – Efficiently archives information by storing just one copy of a file or message, regardless of the number of times it occurs or where it is stored, significantly lowering the long term total cost of ownership by reducing the archive size.
• Seamless End User Experience – Enterprise Vault is designed to be a seamless extension to users existing tools (Outlook, Notes, SharePoint, etc) giving visible access to archived information anytime, anywhere - including mobile devices.
• Intuitive Electronic Discovery with Guided Review – Provides advanced search, legal hold and analysis including guided review, conversation threading, bulk marking and tagging. Relevant items are easily preserved and provided to the requesting party though a flexible and auditable export process to simplify production.
• Simplified Installation and Administration – Provides administrators with wizards and dashboards filled with best practices to get Enterprise Vault up and running in minutes with easy day-to-day management.
• Flexible .pst and .nsf Migration – Automatically locates and migrates existing .pst and .nsf files into the archive re-gaining control of the information contained within those files. Centralized control of .pst and .nsf files accelerates e-discovery while reducing storage costs, backup windows and information risk.
• Open Storage Layer: Virtualizes the underlying storage for transparent data migration between storage systems and allows the archive to consume new storage and new storage systems over time.       

Manage unstructured information
Storage dedicated to old or infrequently accessed data not only wastes precious space, but it also costs time and money to manage, maintain, and back up. Enterprise Vault addresses storage cost and resource issues by providing a centralized, integrated content archiving solution that pulls this unstructured information from multiple sources.

These sources include:

• Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino
• .pst files and .nsf archives
• Microsoft SharePoint® portals
• File servers
• Databases and ERP systems
• Instant messaging systems
• Blackberry SMS and PIN        

Automate mailbox management
Now you can eliminate quotas and message size restrictions and give users a mailbox of virtually unlimited size at the same time controlling message store growth. Also, significantly reduce the time spent dealing with mailbox housekeeping. Admin-defined policies automatically archive individual mailbox email and attachments from Exchange and Domino into online Enterprise Vault stores. Optionally, shortcuts are provided, allowing users to easily view or restore the original items transparently through Microsoft Outlook®, Lotus Notes or via extended Web-based email clients. This enables Exchange and Domino to focus on handling newer information dynamically, while Enterprise Vault acts as a highly-scalable, long-term repository for older information. Thus server performance is dramatically improved, and users enjoy instant access to all of their email without the associated cost and management.

Introduce storage efficiency
Enterprise Vault leverages optimized single instance storage and compression technologies to further reduce the data footprint. By controlling the size of the storage footprint, the applications and servers hosting them remain focused on real-time transactions.  The online archive also enables organizations to rationalize their storage resources and dedicate primary storage to dynamic and transactional data. Older, less frequently accessed content can be moved to a secondary or tertiary storage device, saving money for more strategic purposes. Enterprise Vault also lets you block and eliminate unwanted or inappropriate information, free up space on servers, reduce overall storage requirements, and keep all content fully searchable and instantly accessible, completely transparent to the end user. Furthermore, the Enterprise Vault Open Storage Layer allows Enterprise Vault to virtualize the underlying storage, so that users of the archive are not aware of the storage system they are using today, and more importantly, a new storage system can be introduced to the archive at any time.

Eliminate .pst and .nsf headaches
Enterprise Vault software allows organizations to migrate and archive email content from end-user created .pst and .nsf files into the archive repository while maintaining the end user experience. Centralizing user search and accessibility to this information enables companies to significantly reduce the amount of data stored in local and network based .pst and .nsf files. Ingesting this information and effectively eradicating these files improves performance, scalability, and eases maintenance of both Notes and Outlook clients and Domino and Exchange servers. Restoring user accessibility to this data enables the organization to effectively eradicate .pst and .nsf files without interrupting access to the information. As Enterprise Vault ingests personal store content, mail and file server storage growth will slow, stop, and then likely reverse as the scales tip by removing older content and putting it into a more efficient archive. As an added bonus, users of Outlook Web Access (OWA)(see Figure 5) and Domino Web Access (DWA) will now be able to access and manage this newly ingested data via the respective web client.

Backup, archiving and recovery
IT and backup administrators should consider not only advanced data protection methods for faster backup and recovery, but archiving as well. Combining backup and recovery technologies with archiving enhances traditional backup and recovery by reducing the data stores of applications such as Exchange, Domino, SharePoint, or file servers. Smaller data stores shrink backup and recovery times and can help save money on storage and storage management. More importantly, this archived data can be leveraged for greater value through search and retrieval tools and simplifying electronic discovery. End users benefit from the ability to initiate their own restores quickly, and IT groups spend less time on administrative restore requests. Veritas NetBackup and Symantec Enterprise Vault provide integration that enables customers to define automatic, policy-based migration strategies that move archived data from disk managed by Enterprise Vault to tape or other media managed by NetBackup, helping customers leverage their backup infrastructure to manage archived data and reduce their long term total cost of ownership. Deploying Enterprise Vault, in combination with NetBackup, can relieve backup and recovery problems by removing static and duplicate data from the daily backup process. More important, deploying archiving enables IT groups to manage data growth proactively and leverage the benefits of a centralized repository of corporate data. Enterprise Vault can also facilitate quicker restores in the event of a disaster, as the storage savings typically can be applied to restore times. This helps organizations accomplish their main objective of making Exchange or production data operational in the shortest time possible to help ensure that email and other applications are up and running.

Implement intelligent archiving
For a variety of reasons, IT organizations around the world are being mandated by corporate governance, legal and compliance groups to implement company-wide retention policies on corporate information. Unstructured information like email, documents in SharePoint and on file servers are not exempt from these requirements. Because not all data is created equal, (i.e. business, personal, junk, spam, etc.), companies are increasingly interested in controlling archive storage and operational costs. Intelligent archiving is a content aware classification methodology in Enterprise Vault that helps companies create a repeatable method of classifying and storing unstructured information. Intelligent archiving helps companies meet corporate retention requirements and enforce records management policies. This is accomplished through multiple classification options using automated classification, user-driven classification, or third-party classification technologies. Once data is classified, powerful policy enforcement technology applies retention and expiry rules across different classes of information to ensure it is kept only as long as it is needed. This helps significantly lower operational cost, as the size of the archive is kept in check. Providing context gives more structure to the archive and enables an intelligent means to search, discover, and leverage archived information on an open platform, allowing customization and innovation.

Archive for search, e-discovery and investigations
Any IT administrator who has had to respond to a  corporate lawsuit or internal investigation understands the difficulty of collecting and delivering files, messages, or other content for legal review. Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator extends the basic search functionality of Enterprise Vault archiving to help lower the cost of data collection and to facilitate the review and analysis of archived items in electronic discovery. Discovery Accelerator provides a powerful and efficient user interface with advanced search and analysis capabilities such as guided review, conversation threading and bulk marking and tagging. Relevant items are easily preserved as part of the legal hold process and provided to the requesting party though a flexible export process to simplify production.

Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator is a highly configurable add-on solution to Enterprise Vault allowing companies to perform cost-effective supervisory review of email to help ensure compliance with corporate policy and regulatory bodies. Providing the framework to select and sample target email, manage its review by appropriate reviewers, and record the process for audit purposes, Compliance Accelerator helps to decrease the cost and effort of email supervision, review, and compliance demonstration.