Improved eDiscovery and Storage Efficiency Begins with Effective Archiving

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Here’s an interesting dilemma: What would you rather do – get your teeth cleaned at the dentist, or process a search request for your in-house Legal team?

On Monday, June 11, Symantec conducted a survey on the exhibit show floor during Microsoft TechEd North America 2012 in Orlando, FL. There, over 100 qualified respondents were asked a total of 18 questions surrounding their use of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Exchange Online/Office 365.

Surprisingly – or maybe not – over a third of respondents would rather get their teeth cleaned at the dentist than process a search request on email for their in-house Legal team.

We learned from survey respondents that being able to search for archived and un-archived content within Exchange and beyond (45%) was one of their top eDiscovery goals. By indexing all information stored in the archive, Symantec Enterprise Vault enables efficient search regardless of whether information was ingested from Exchange, SharePoint or other sources. And with the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform, organizations can easily search and discover relevant info within the Enterprise Vault archive and even on sources that may not have been archived, such as desktops, laptops or workstations.

And what about the storage efficiency of Exchange?

We also learned from our respondents that top archiving priorities for Microsoft Exchange include controlling PSTs without incurring additional storage requirements.

In fact, despite tools being available to help manage unstructured data, this still poses significant challenges for organizations. Symantec found that 93% of respondents face at least one issue associated with unstructured data that is somewhat or extremely challenging.

We continually hear from our customers and partners that archiving with Enterprise Vault helps minimize the Exchange storage footprint while helping control bloat, which in turn leads to better storage predictability for Exchange. In fact, archiving with Enterprise Vault actually reduces storage footprint and costs by up to 60% or more by automatically moving older, not recently accessed information from primary systems, such as Exchange, to an archive, while retention and deletion policies keep information for only as long as it is needed. This should come in handy for the over half of survey respondents who identified the Microsoft Exchange Server as their top archiving priority for long-term information retention, compliance or eDiscovery purposes. File servers came in second.

This recent survey also confirmed that many organizations are looking to move Exchange to the cloud by opting for Office 365. Results indicate that nearly half of organizations (42%) are discussing a planned migration to Office 365. End user access topped the list of respondents’ most important archiving goals for Office 365, with another top priority of preserving a copy of messages in a separate data center.

For those companies that prefer to archive Exchange 2010 messages in the cloud, Enterprise Vault.cloud captures all messages sent and received into a centralized repository that supports multi-mailbox search and legal hold enforcement, while providing end users with access to their archived emails and attachments whenever they need it.

So, the next time you’re wishing you were having your teeth cleaned rather than processing a search request for the Legal team, put your dreams of the dentist’s chair to rest. With the proper tools, including Enterprise Vault, Enterprise Vault.cloud and Clearwell, to support your Exchange use, archiving and eDiscovery tasks aren’t nearly as daunting as you may have originally thought.

Before I sign off, shout out to my blog co-author, Amy Dugdale. Amy and I invite you to review a summary of the survey results attached to the blog.

Symantec TechEd 2012 Survey - Key Findings.pdf ‏40 KB