Education Email Archiving
Schools Need an Email Archive
Educational institutions, from K-12 to Major Universities face many challenges in managing the email and collaboration systems. They are not immune to the demands of email discovery requests that can take the form of an outside lawsuit, an internal dispute with Human Resources regarding hiring and firing practices or a simple request for public information. These educational institutions need to know more then ever have a service in place to facilitate the archival and eDiscovery of email communications.
Challenge #1: Legal Discovery and Retention Policies
Legal opinions are being made regularly that are forcing changes in how organizations look at email retention. Amendments made in December of 2006 to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and subsequent opinions since then affect the private and public sector alike. Email retention policies must consider:
- The lack of a policy is not considered a policy
- Production of records from backup tapes is a wasteful proposition
- Quick response times during discovery for what can be produced and what can not
Challenge #2: Storage Management
Due to our dependence upon email, there is no wonder that email stores have experienced exponential growth in the past few years. Many of mail stores have grown to a point that data restorations have become prohibitively time-consuming and difficult. This also has a direct effect on an your IT organizations ability to back-up the network on a regular basis, since many end users have been forced to offload email to personal archives or PST files. This then begins to consume network storage. In addition to the obvious concerns around storage, the email situation can become exacerbated by personal archive files or PST files not stored on network shares, but dispersed on desktops and remote laptops. From a disaster recovery perspective, there is a high probability that your organization will be unable to restore all of their email in a reasonable amount of time to effectively keep the organization up and running.
Challenge #3 – Shrinking Resources
Educational institutions are facing budget restrictions and are trying to accomplish more IT tasks with shrinking budgets and resource pools. The time required to evaluate an email archiving solution, associated hardware and storage options may take many months. This coupled with the protracted approval; budgeting and procurement processes found in the educational organizations put critical projects like email archiving 18-24 months behind in the technology curve. Meanwhile, the protracted approval and procurement cycle can impact the growth of email storage adding additional budgetary strains on this project. In many cases, this places the IT personnel in a difficult position by now trying to deliver archiving and storage management with less available storage then was calculated months earlier during the budgeting and approval process.
The Solution for Schools? Hosted Message Archiving.
Educational Institutions are increasingly looking towards hosted email archiving services like Sonian’s Archive Service to address all these challenges.
- Capture all emails for email retention and provide multiple layers of secure access for legal administrators and search users to comply with discovery requests.
- Provide end users with access their historical mail through the archive for day to day knowledge management, but more importantly business continuity in the event of an mail server failure
- Allow end users with proper permissions to process their own personal archives or PST files into the archive service, eliminating the need for special migration projects or fees.
- Help the management of storage growth and restrictions on the mail servers and network shares allowing for shorter, more frequent backups and quicker restoration times.
The Benefits of a Hosted Email Archive
Satisfy Legal Discovery
The Sonian Archive performs a full-text index on all emails and attachments and maintains this index, along with all associated emails on online storage. Unlike other archive vendors, who, in order to keep their costs low, migrate your older data to offline or near-line storage systems. This dramatically increases the amount of time required to search or the final export of results. Sonian keeps all data online and immediately accessible for searches which allows our service to provide results on data sets of millions of messages in just a few seconds.
Sonian’s full web enabled user interfaces are intuitive for all skill set levels, especially for those outside of IT department who typically would be performing email searches and discovery. Extensive self-service online training videos guide users through all tasks.
Improved Storage Management and Data Access
Sonian Archive addresses the organization’s storage management requirements in two primary ways. First, it provides end users with access to their historical email through the archive. This allows the IT department to enforce tighter email quotas on the mail server, reducing the storage burden, and making it easier to manage and back-up the email server. Second, the archive allows for the restriction of local archives and PST files, relieving not only network storage resources but numerous help desk calls.
A hidden benefit is for those common requests from end users who have deleted emails from their mailboxes. No longer is the email administrators tasked with accessing this lost email since they already have access to their archives.
Finally, due to the large number of transient staff members found within educational organizations, accessing past emails easily allow permanent staff members to maintain a level of business continuity.
A Hosted Archive is Easy to Setup and Requires Near Zero Maintenance
Sonian Archive is a 100% hosted service requiring no local installation of hardware or agents. The average Educational Institution with 100′s or 1000′s of mailboxes can be fully configured, capturing email and performing discovery search requests within a few hours.
The Sonian Archive is offered at an extremely affordable per mailbox/month charge with unlimited storage included. Since it is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) with no hardware or software licenses to buy, there are no capital outlay requirements.
Finally, with unlimited storage included in the mailbox cost/month your organization eliminates the unknowns found with other solutions with unexpected storage growth or manipulation of email retention policies to maintain within budget requirements.