TechTip: Delete Your Email Storage Problems

[Turls]

The volume of email that needs to be stored seems out of control. But now there's a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Intelligent archiving features in Symantec Enterprise Vault let administrators choose from three approaches for classifying email messages. Once messages are classified, it's easy to save what's important and delete what's not. Costs and risk are reduced. Discovery and compliance are streamlined. The approaches are:

1. User archiving: Sometimes users know best what the value of a message is. Enterprise Vault lets them choose a message's records category from a pop-up box, or they can drag the message to a particular Outlook folder to classify it. A sales rep, for instance, might have a folder for sales contract-related email and another for purchase order-related email. The first folder can be set to be retained for seven years, the second for three.
    
2. Automated archiving: Enterprise Vault also supports custom rules that automatically enforce archiving policies. A message's retention can depend on whether it's internal or external, or has certain types of recipients, senders, or key words in contents or attachments. For instance, messages containing a social security or credit card number can be flagged to be saved for a given period of years.
   
   Intellectual property can be protected because Enterprise Vault can be set to scan email and attachments for certain key words and tag messages that carry them for special treatment, archiving, or review.
    
3. Third-party archiving: Some organizations already have major records management solutions or enterprise content management systems. Enterprise Vault integrates them to scan and store email messages in accordance with their policies.

Reducing archiving's cost

To minimize costs, Enterprise Vault can sweep up all non-record content left in user mailboxes and enforce deletion policies. When it saves messages it compresses them, and stores an attachment sent to multiple recipients only once.

Enterprise Vault can also be set to migrate archived email to the type of storage that's most appropriate. Older messages can be automatically migrated from a SAN to more cost-efficient SATA disks. For compliance purposes, messages that require write once read many (WORM) storage can be automatically sent there.

Enterprise Vault provides these kind of archiving capabilities not just for email but also file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and content management and collaboration systems. Find out more here.