Somerfield's store of e-mails from business transactions
was becoming unwieldy and difficult to manage. Now, specialist
software and an e-mail vault enables it to store and retrieve
e-mails in seconds. Kathryn Wilcox investigates
Two years ago, Colin Clark, corporate cost audit manager at
supermarket chain Somerfield, had no way of knowing what
information the business was losing or any way of pinpointing and
retrieving critical content. Now, in seconds, Clark can locate any
e-mail from any source. Somerfield archives every external e-mail
at the point of first contact in its original form. It is
accessible, retrievable and admissible in court.
Its e-mail vault can be searched for occurrences of a key word -
even within e-mail attachments. Although Somerfield does not
monitor employee e-mails, its e-mails are stored in a vault to be
retrieved. Dangerous spoof e-mails can be tracked as they arrive,
users alerted and the business protected.
Two factors prompted Somerfield to ring-fence its e-mail
management and storage. "It was impossible to maintain our exchange
server," says Clark. "It had become unwieldy. We had 3,500 Exchange
users, each with a mailbox quota of 30Mbytes. Users resorted to
personal folders to cope with the overflow. Our main method of
communication was neither policed nor protected and our solution
was to throw more disc space at the problem."
But e-mail has also irrevocably altered the fundamentals of the
business - notably in negotiations. "We generate about 70,000
e-mails each week and 85% to 90% of our commercial agreements with
suppliers take place electronically," Clark says.
Osterman Research estimates that the average age of a
retrievable e-mail is ten months, whereas regulations can demand
records of three to six years, or even lifetime retention.
Somerfield needed a way of storing the e-mails in the event of a
dispute. Also, if the system becomes unstable, or an employee
leaves the company, it needed a way to guarantee that the records
would not be lost.
Somerfield turned to KVS' Enterprise Vault to archive e-mails,
eliminate personal folders, support regulatory compliance and
ensure that valuable information could be retrieved quickly. Now,
any e-mail received through the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is
journaled within the Exchange system. KVS software retrieves the
e-mail from Exchange and, even though it may have been sent to
multiple inboxes, it stores a single copy in a compressed format in
the vault.
A web page, driven by Alta Vista software, enables Colin or his
team to search the vault by keyword, date, sender or recipient,
document size or attributes and retrieve e-mails within seconds.
The vault presents no data quality issues as it simply stores the
original e-mail as it came into the business.
After a pilot test period, Somerfield rolled out the programme,
starting with the capture of all external e-mails relating to
commercial negotiations. Somerfield is now deploying a mailbox
archive facility without quotas or personal files that provides
users with unlimited, easy-to-search mailboxes. It has also
implemented a surf control to filter e-mails at the point of
entry.
Users' mailboxes look the same but they see a "place marker"
next to a message that has been compressed and stored in the vault.
But isn't this intruding on employee privacy? Clark says, "We are
not policing users. We are simply protecting the business as we are
legally permitted to do. Staff are fully aware of our e-mail
policy. A search of the vault is only conducted for justified
business reasons and we only retrieve e-mails relating to the issue
under investigation. E-mail privacy is not compromised."
Cost savings from the e-mail vault are difficult to quantify,
but Clark expects payback on software within 12 months and storage
cost reductions of around 30%. But protecting the business from
risk is, he says, "priceless".
Colin Clark presents "E-mail - the information time bomb: how to
determine the best strategy solution to meet the business
objectives" on 16 October at Storage Expo 2003.
www.storage-expo.com
Tackling e-mail management
Identify what is happening with your e-mail and secure your
position. How is information stored? What happens to an inbox if an
employee leaves the business? Could you locate any e-mail in five
years' time?
Develop an enforceable e-mail policy. Make employees aware of
it.
Analyse your e-mail. According to Osterman Research, 60% of data
critical to users' ability to do their jobs resides in their
e-mail
Protect your business with an e-mail vault or archive
Sort e-mail to ensure that only business information is stored
in the vault
Filter e-mails at the point of entry to screen out unsolicited
mail.