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Harnessing the Power of Information Governance

Data retention

Automated Legal Hold Management with Veritas Enterprise Vault 

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If you can legally expire old data, what are you waiting for?? When you have data hanging around, your business is susceptible to certain risks and unnecessary costs, including data breaches, storage costs, legal fees and settlement costs when information gets into the wrong hands. The biggest problem is that without expiring data, it is now unnecessarily available for legal discovery. Before you can let the data go, however, it needs to be handled correctly, either by setting the appropriate retention category and/or by placing some of the data on “litigation hold.”  

In this post, we’ll be talking about putting data stored in Veritas Enterprise Vault on litigation hold. This task can be daunting, especially if your organization is large, with multiple locations, but there are ways to make sure you’re protected without dedicating an entire team to this herculean effort! 

Examples 

The creation of 13,000 Discovery Accelerator cases in each of 6 geographic Enterprise Vault locations could take a team many months or even years to complete. However, with the Legal Hold manager, this can be automated and performed by one part-time person or driven via the provided API integrated with an organization’s existing processes. 

Archive Accelerator Legal Hold Manager uses Veritas Discovery Accelerator (DA) to place holds on data stored in Enterprise Vault archives. With this streamlined integration, cases created with Legal Hold Manager can also be managed through DA. 

Legal Hold Manager provides an API into Veritas Discovery Accelerator for integration with third-party legal hold software or a customer’s own internal automation. This maximizes efficiency and allows for continued use of existing applications and processes. 

Cases 

The modern web interface provides a view of the status of all your cases created within Legal Hold Manager, making them easier to manage across multiple Discovery Accelerator databases and servers.  

Evergreen Hold 

Legal Hold Manager supports scheduled searches for custodians on evergreen hold. We create recurring searches to pick up any new messages that were created since the hold was initially put in place. This ensures that any new data will be captured and placed on hold. 

Key Features: 

  • Automate the creation of thousands of cases in Veritas Discovery Accelerator (DA) 
  • Support for multiple DA customer databases and servers 
  • Central view of DA cases across all DA servers and databases within an Enterprise Vault site. 
  • Dramatically reduces manpower required to place thousands of custodians on legal hold 
  • Uses throttling to avoid taxing the Enterprise Vault and DA environments 
  • Provides an API for third-party integration to enable seamless automation 
  • Custodians, Email addresses and Cases can be fed into the system via .csv files to allow placing bulk holds. 

If you have many custodians whose data must be placed on hold in Enterprise Vault, let’s discuss how Legal Hold Manager can help you either through our built-in GUI or via integration with your existing processes.

Ways to Manage Data Retention in Enterprise Vault 

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For users of Veritas Enterprise Vault, managing the retention of data is an ongoing challenge.  That said, there are different ways this challenge can be addressed depending on timeline, end goals, and in some cases, regulatory requirements. 

There are a few outcomes that best practices in data retention can deliver, including: 

  • Enhanced speed and efficiency of managing and accessing data 
  • Reducing storage costs 
  • Limiting liability and ensuring compliance with industry guidelines and government regulations 
  • Having a clearly defined and automated system and structure in place 

Enterprise Vault is often purchased with the intention of preserving data, but at the time of implementation, users don’t often know what the policies should be. What typically happens in this case is that the default retention is used, which is set to keep data forever.  

More and more companies are realizing that isn’t the best strategy, and that they need to get their data under control. It’s not only important to retain data, but equally if not more important to get rid of it when you don’t need to keep it in your archives. 

In this post, we’re going to briefly examine each of the ways you can preserve, or purge, your data in Enterprise Vault.  

  • You can tell Enterprise Vault directly what the retention policy for a particular set of data should be, so it knows when to purge the data. 
  • You can also tell Enterprise Vault to not allow deletion of items in an archive.  This will prevent users from deleting items and prevent the storage deletion process from deleting expired items. 
  • You can use EV’s Discovery Accelerator if you want to put someone’s email on hold. To do this, you would create a case, search for data, find results, tell DA that the case is on hold, which DA then tells EV. 
  • You can use Veritas Information Classifier (VIC) to set retention categories on items as they are archived in Enterprise Vault.  
  • You can use Vault Solutions’ Software, Policy Manager. The difference between VIC and Policy Manager is that with the latter, you can change the retention category of items not just when they’re archived but at any time afterward. With VIC, you can also re-categorize items to give them a new retention category, but that requires re-indexing the archive. 

Enabling users to make changes after data is archived makes Policy Manger an extremely valuable tool for many industries, including financial, legal, engineering, and more.   
 

Here are a few industry-specific drivers for data archiving and the priority for functionality. 

Legal 
Typically, law firms are focused on mailbox archiving. They don’t want to hold onto anything they don’t have to, and they also don’t want to have more than one copy of an item. Quite often using a 3rd party document management system, like NetDocuments or iManage, is helpful. Learn more about this using Outlook Accelerator here!

 
Financial 
Banks and other financial institutions focus on journals and need to keep their data for at least 6-7 years due to regulatory requirements from organizations such as the SEC and FINRA. Financial institutions are also heavy users of the Legal Hold capability of Discovery Accelerator. 

 
Engineering 
Engineering firms quite often need to hold onto certain types of file systems data – QA data and records, for example – for a long time.  They need to hold onto it, but rarely need to reference it, which is why they put it into archives. There isn’t usually much variation in how long they need to hold onto the data. 

 
Other 

Other industries that need to conduct more frequent inquiries, like pharmaceutical companies, are concerned with archiving in a manner that makes the data easy to review.  

At the end of the day, the best method for you depends on your compliance and eDiscovery requirements. If you’d like to dive deeper into the right option for you, give us a call. We’re happy to help! 

Why Does Automating Your Retention Policies Make Sense?

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The short answer: Time, Money, & Trouble. 

Governance in Office 365 was a hot topic at a conference I recently attended. I was pleased about how much time was spent talking about it. It means it’s important and there’s a need.  

By now, everyone knows about GDPR. It applies to companies in Europe, and those that do business with people and companies in Europe, but increasingly there are GDPR-like and GDPR-inspired regulations coming to play here in the US. While there isn’t a federal data protection law that protects all consumers, certain industries have them, and recently, some state governments have begun to implement these regulations as well. For example, the banking, financial, health, and insurance sectors all have compliance requirements when it comes to retaining, storing, and disposing of records.  

But how do large companies manage their data to stay in compliance, while not overwhelming resources and staff?  

The truth is you can’t rely on users to manually set retention policies.  It’s just not realistic. It takes too much time, failing to delete unnecessary records costs money, and manual retention setting risks human error and potential litigation. This is where automation steps in. 

Data retention not only addresses legal requirements but enables companies to eliminate excess data. Having a set policy that automatically categorizes data helps an organization hold onto valuable information while purging records that have little importance or value – without manually archiving or deleting. This practice of having policies in place to automatically set retention policies based on certain characteristics or events (someone leaving the company, for example) ensures that the appropriate records are retained and saves money by clearing out those that are simply taking up space. Having data automatically set to delete based on a compliance schedule also reduces the risk of litigation and eliminates the need to migrate unnecessary records. 

The reality is that there are data protection laws for, no surprise, our protection. And truthfully, they are simply supporting retention policies – the rules established for retaining and disposing of an organization’s records. Setting up your records classification to update automatically according to the predetermined settings in your retention policies helps you stay in compliance with these ever-changing laws, and saves time, money, and maybe most importantly, trouble. 

15 Years and Counting: An Interview with Dave Ouellette

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Being in business for 15 years is quite an accomplishment, so we sat down with Vault Solutions co-founder and President, Dave Ouellette to get his take on this milestone! Learn the secrets behind Vault Solutions’ success and see what’s in store for the next 15!

Q: 15 years! That’s awesome. How does that make you feel? 

Dave: It’s been a decade and a half of helping companies manage their data and analytics, and we couldn’t be prouder of how far we’ve pushed the data archiving needle. As we look back on the past 15 years, we’ve got a lot to celebrate! 

Q: What gave you the nudge to start Vault Solutions? 

Dave: We founded Vault Solutions because back in the early days, I was the one responsible for finding third-party solutions that could add certain functionality to Enterprise Vault. In looking to fill those gaps, I realized there weren’t solutions that could do the job… so we decided to start a company that would build them. 

Q: What are some of the big accomplishments that you’ve achieved over the past 15 years? 

Dave: We’ve helped hundreds of companies across the globe manage their data, including many of the largest banks in the world and some of the most prestigious law firms.  

We have earned the role of a trusted partner, working hand in hand with Veritas, and many of our products have actually been commissioned by them to ensure customer success. 

And, most of all, we have loyal, committed employees that mean the world to us. On average, they’ve been with us for over 10 years, and only one employee has ever resigned…only to come back 2 years later! 

Q: Is there one product that stands out most to you? Do you have a favorite? 

Dave:  We’re proud of our products, all of which have been driven by customer needs. But I think if I had to pick one, ok – 2, it would be the Catalog and Policy Manager.  

Q: Why those 2? 

Dave: Many years ago, we needed to create a product that would export data. That was the first step. Then, a company we were helping asked for something to help export just the metadata and fast. Like 2 million messages per hour fast. Another customer wanted that metadata in a database, and the Catalog was born with a sub-second response time.  

To top it all off, companies were asking for the capability to do things with that info that was now identified in the catalog, like change retention settings, move to other locations, etc. That added functionality was made possible with Policy Manager.  

They really change the way companies manage their data, and save exponential time and resources. It’s pretty neat. 

Q: What does the future hold for Vault Solutions? 

Dave: It’s pretty wild when you think about it – only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. We’re 100% bootstrapped, and still 100% founder/family-owned and operated…and proud of it! 

We’re on a roll and love what we do. Everything we build helps our customers succeed. It enables them to do what they need to do better and more efficiently, and that’s what it’s all about. So, what does the future hold?  

Our customers are asking us to have our Policy Manager and Catalog products work directly with Microsoft 365, and we’ll be releasing that update in 2022. That product will vastly expand our target market, increasing the number of customers we can serve worldwide. 

We’re going to keep making data management even easier, faster, and more functional for companies across the globe. For at least another 15 years! 

Introducing Archive Accelerator Policy Manager

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Introducing Archive Accelerator Policy Manager

Having helped countless enterprises deploy Enterprise Vault, I can tell you that when first deployed, almost no enterprise has a document retention policy defined. Unfortunately, this means they go with the defaults, which is ‘keep everything forever’ and doesn’t bode well down the road. 

In recent years, many organizations have finally gotten around to putting proper retention policies in place, or at least have started to define processes to do that. 

These policies can be as simple as changing the default policy to 6 or 7 years, instead of forever, but others get more complicated.  Some other examples are: 

  • For mailbox archiving, set everything in certain folders to n years, but put the default at a much lower number.  This encourages users to file things they need to keep longer. 
  • For Journal archives, use different retention policies based on who the person is, or even what department or country that are in.  For example, keep data for VIP users longer than normal.   

Once defined, actually setting the policy can be a challenge.  How do you identify all message in a journal sent by members of a particular group? 

Also, how do you handle overlapping policies for an item in a journal?  For example, one message is sent to 3 people who work in different groups or countries, and may therefore have different retention requirements.  Which policy do you choose to set? 

We’ve talked to other companies, large and small, about these issues, and believe we’ve come up solution that is flexible enough to fit most, if not all, cases. 

We start with the Archive Accelerator Catalog, which we’ve done several blog posts about already. You can read about it’s introduction, how relevant the Catalog is in everyday use, and how the Catalog can save time and money when it comes to data migration. 

When we showed the Catalog to various customers and partners, especially with the Power BI reports that take advantage of its speed, the question always came up… “Great, now that you’ve found the exact 20,354 messages that meet my criteria (in less than a second), what can I do about it?  Can I change the retention, for example?” 

With the newly released ‘Archive Accelerator Policy Manager’, we are finally making that possible! 

You can now manage your archived data to meet new compliance and government regulations, business rules, and more. Policy Manager gives you flexibility in building searches based on metadata, allows you to implement new retention rules on previously archived data, remove data that should no longer be retained, and provides sub-second speed and responsiveness when filtering the data to be processed.  

With these capabilities at your fingertips, just imagine how Policy Manager can make managing your data easier and more seamless! 

How to Map Enterprise Vault Retention Policies to Microsoft 365 Exchange Retention Policies

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You’re facing the task of moving your on-premises email from Veritas Enterprise Vault™ to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365).  Now you’re wondering how to implement retention policies in Microsoft 365 similar to Enterprise Vault. How will these policies transfer? Is it even possible? How do I make sure our policies are exactly what we need and that all these messages have the correct retention policies in Microsoft 365? 

Veritas Enterprise Vault™ policies consist of retention categories, retention plans, storage expiry, and legal holds.  Microsoft 365 mailbox policies are defined by retention tags and retention policies. Retention tags define the name, type, retention period, and retention activity. The retention policy consists of a retention tag or multiple retention tags. It is this policy that is associated with a mailbox or group of mailboxes that defines the retention. A mailbox can have only one retention policy associated with it. 

The Enterprise Vault retention and mailbox policies can be mapped to Microsoft 365 retention policies, and then these retention policies are applied to the mailboxes. The policies and tags can be found in Exchange admin center | compliance management. 

Microsoft has some excellent information on this process, but in a simple outline, these are the steps you need to take before migrating your mailboxes to Microsoft 365. Keep in mind that if these steps are done post migration of the mailboxes, the default retention and deletion policies of Microsoft 365 will take effect:  

  • Create new retention tags for the archive and deletion policies 
  • Create a new retention policy or multiple retention policies 
  • Assign a retention policy to user mailboxes 
  • If you choose to do so, make one of the newly created retention policies the default for your organization. 

To illustrate, let’s look at an example from our fictitious company named the Contoso Corporation. 

The current retention and mailbox policies applied to the CONTOSOEV1 Enterprise Vault mailbox archives are… 

  • CONTOSOEV1 Enterprise Vault
    • Mailbox Policy: Archive messages older than 3 months
    • Shortcut Deletion Policy:  Delete shortcuts after 2 years 
    • Retention Policy: Keep items 10 years 

Keep in mind that the Enterprise Vault Mailbox Policy above, defines messages are to be archived when they become older than 3 months. This is typical for the purpose of saving space on on-premise Exchange Servers. If enabled, Enterprise Vault will create a shortcut for the archived item in the user’s mailbox. So, the user still has access to the item in the archive directly from the mailbox.  There is also an optional policy in Enterprise Vault for how long to hold onto Shortcuts. This is set at Contoso for 2 years. This is typicallydone to manage the total number of items in a mailbox. 

In this example, we’ll create new Contoso retention tags and policies in Microsoft 365. Additional retention tags can be added to the policies as required. 

  • CONTOSO
    • retention policy: Contoso Retention Policy 
      • retention tags:
        • Contoso 2 year move to archive
        • Contoso 10 year delete  

Since there are generous mailbox quotes in Exchange Online (typically 100 GB as of this writing), there is no need to archive an item after 3 months. Instead, we’ll keep them in the mailbox, but set up a policy to move messages to the Archive mailbox after 2 years, which is how long users are used to having mail remain in their mailbox. 

Next, we’ll apply the Contoso Retention Policy to Microsoft 365 mailboxes. This policy includes the two new tags… 

  • Move to archive: Defines the time period a message can remain in a mailbox before being moved to theuser’s In-Place archive. 
  • Delete: Delete after 10 years. 

Now, when users are migrated to Microsoft 365, they should have a similar experience to that which they had with Enterprise Vault Mailbox archiving.  The fewer changes, the better! 

Have you migrated from Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365? If you haven’t mapped your retention policies and you’re looking for some guidance, check out the link above, or give us a call. We’re happy to help!