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National Rugby League tackled their email archiving problem with EV.cloud

Philip_Routley
Level 3
Employee Accredited

 

When Maurice Veliz was hired as IT Manager for the National Rugby League (NRL) in 2011, he and his two-person staff were charged with consolidating the IT systems used by multiple Rugby League bodies. “A lot of things were based on spreadsheets and Word documents,” he recalls. Veliz has since helped NRL to centralize and upgrade finance, HR, and other functions.
 
THE CHALLENGE
But NRL’s email systems presented perhaps the biggest challenge. “We had seven mail servers, of varying platforms,” he says. Consolidating Rugby League’s 300 email accounts onto a single Microsoft Exchange 2010 platform was the first step, but Veliz knew that NRL needed to do more.
 
Specifically, it needed an email archive, primarily for legal reasons. “Our sport is large in Australia, and as a result we have the potential to be involved in high profile legal action,” Veliz says. “But there was no structured archiving or backups of email. When I pointed this out to our CEO, he didn’t realize the implications”—that is, that email is frequently required as evidence in lawsuits, and that without email archiving, messages can be lost or deleted.
 
THE SOLUTION
To meet the Rugby League’s email-archiving challenge, Veliz chose Symantec™ Enterprise Vault.cloud. He had compared email archiving solutions at a previous job, and knew that Symantec’s cloud-based solution would integrate well with the NRL’s consolidated email system. He had additional confidence in Symantec because NRL was already using Symantec™ Email Security.cloud to block hundreds of spam messages and malware-carrying emails every month—4.8% of the total incoming mail volume
 
“I knew how it all worked, so I knew that it was going to be very simple to set up,” Veliz says. “We didn’t need a learning curve.” He acquired Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud in January 2013 through Symantec Registered Partner Oriel Technologies. (One Oriel executive is a former Australian Olympic swimmer who understands the complicated business of sports, Veliz notes.) NRL eliminated PST files from its Exchange server, working from the top of the organization down. “It was a great thing when we got rid of all the PSTs,”
 
THE BENEFITS
With email safely archived using Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud, Veliz is confident that NRL can respond to legal requests. “I just don’t worry about it anymore,” he says. But legal coverage is just one benefit of the new solution. Its ease of use became apparent within a few weeks of deployment, when a user—an ex-footballer who wasn’t tech-savvy—needed to retrieve a lost email. “We just told him we had a function he can use to look for archive  messages, told him where it was, and he found out himself how to do it,” Veliz recalls. “Everything just worked through Outlook, so it worked great.” He adds that the retrieval procedure has been spreading from user to user, without formal training.
 
Another benefit is the ability to automatically provide email continuity if NRL’s Exchange server fails through Enterprise Vault Mailbox Continuity.cloud. With this service, NRL employees can access their email in the event of an Exchange server outage—and when the mail server is restored, any messages sent or received during the outage are automatically restored to it.
 
The predictable cost of Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud—based on a per-user, per-month charge, regardless of the size of the archive—helps Veliz control NRL’s IT budget. “If the email archive was in-house, I’d be freaking out about it,” he laughs. “Every week it seems to double in size. But I don’t have to think about that.” Instead, he can concentrate on more important things—like whether his favorite club, The Manly Sea Eagles, will make it to the playoffs.
 

 

 

ABOUT THE NRL
National Rugby League (NRL) is an Australian based nationwide body that oversees 16 professional teams, supports over 300 of regional amateur and children’s leagues, and has annual revenues greater than $300 million