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The cases cited herein are real however the name of the customer (CS5) is fictitious. Wikibon case studies are developed independently and their development is not initiated for or funded by any single company. Wikibon reports actual customer experiences and results with no attempt to emphasize any one vendor’s strengths or weaknesses. Read the full disclaimer.

Snapshot on a page

Highlights

CS5 is retail organization with over 250,000 employees. The Exchange email system has about 75,000 seats and about 500,000 messages every day. The size of the email box is small at 100MB for all but two thousand mailboxes. All mail is deleted after 21 days. Email is backed up to tape for another 35 days. After that (total of 56 days) all tape data is deleted. No user folder or .pst files are retained by users.

The only exceptions to this policy are the email accounts for the top 200 executives in the company. There is journaling on these accounts, and are archived to a Symantec Enterprise Vault system. The Enterprise Vault system is also used to filter incoming and outgoing message with certain key words or phrases for executive review. The email archive data is held on two EMC Centera boxes, which help with single instancing of attachments. There is a total of about 50 terabytes of storage. The total acquisition cost for the email archiving system implementation was about $1million.

The overall philosophy of CS5 is to reduce the risk and cost of legal discovery by eliminating as many emails as possible. They point out that the regulations do not say how long emails have to be kept, only that whatever policy is adopted by an organization is consistently followed. By keeping the emails of the top 200 executives, CS5 believe they are defending themselves against larger scale class-action suits by being able to show that (for example) senior management were not aware and had not given approval for the decisions of a local manager. The financial and brand risk of small-scale litigation at a local level is not considered high by CS5 in their segment of the retail industry.

Original Email Snapshot

CS5 have about 75,000 email boxes. Most of the users have a 100-megabyte mailboxes and that is their maximum. And then we have another group of users which have 200 and 500-megabyte mailboxes. These are for more senior users such as District Managers and Vice-Presidents. There is a "super group" of users which have unlimited mailboxes, and those are the senior executives and anybody else that happens to complain enough.

Pain Points

• CS5 could not filter incoming and outgoing emails for specific words and phrases to reduce the risk of liability from emails
• CS5 did not have a mechanism for isolating senior executives from the “rogue” decisions of local managers
• CS5 could not ensure all emails for the top 200 executives were captured and retained
• There is a constant need to keep costs to a minimum in the retail industry

Solution Strategy

• CS5 implemented a Symantec Enterprise Vault solution for email archiving of the email boxes for the tope 200 CS5 executives
• Email journaling was turned on for all emails involving the email accounts of the top 200 executives
• Enterprise Vault was selected because:
  • The project team had previous positive experience with it
  • It provided message filtering for ingoing and outgoing messages
  • It had the best contextual search and indexing capabilities for email discovery
• The current policies of minimizing the emails kept was retained

Adoption Issues

• CS5 used in house IT project managers to coordinate the technical implementation
• The legal department were responsible for implementing the ediscovery processes and procedures
• There was extensive briefing of the senior executives on the business reasons for implementing email archiving just for them

Benefits

• Low cost solution which was quick to implement
• Minimizes the legal exposure for CS5 and complies with the current regulations
• Enables CS5 to show to litigants and the courts when senior executives were not involved, which reduces the scope of any class action law-suit
• Expandable if necessary to broader range of executives and/or professionals

Conclusions

Wikibon draws the following conclusions from this case study:

1. CS5 has a laser focus on risk reduction at minimum cost
2. CS5 has reduced the exposure to email discovery by having clear policies to eliminate as much email as possible. They keep email boxes small, retain emails for 21 days on the server, and back them up to tape for an additional 38 days. After that email data is over-written.
3. CS5 reduced the scope of any legal challenge by having the email archives for the mailboxes of the top 200 executives
4. CS5 are able to perform low-cost in-house ediscovery, and select the best legal defense strategy early to minimize legal exposure

The key to the CS5 strategy was implementing clear policies of holding email for a limited period of time. Getting rid of emails reduced the risk to the organization.

The negative consequences of this strategy are the business inconvenience of not being able to find older emails, and the risk that a court will deem that not holding emails for a longer period of time is an unreasonable interpretation of the rules.

Wikibon would observe that if this strategy were adopted widely in US organizations, the regulators and lawmakers are likely to change the rules and laws. If this strategy were adopted by an organization, there should be budget and plans to rapidly expand the scope of email archiving solution. In Wikibon’s opinion, this is a risky strategy for companies with international operations.