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Harnessing the Power of Information Governance

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Integrating Enterprise Vault with Third Party Compliance Applications.

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Many companies use VeritasTM Enterprise Vault as the repository of record for all their email, which is typically used for eDiscovery or Compliance purposes.  Veritas does have eDiscovery and Compliance applications that obviously integrate very well with Enterprise Vault, but there are other companies that provide solutions customers may want to use. We sometimes receive requests from customers that, for whatever reason, want to use one of these 3rd party compliance applications with Enterprise Vault. 

A 3rd party vender is not likely to have a tight integration with Enterprise Vault, but a connection can be made by setting up a system to automatically export messages from Enterprise Vault on a daily or even hourly schedule to be provided in an industry standard format, such as EML, MSG or PST. 

Typically, a compliance application needs to look at just a subset of messages that are journaled.  There will be a list of employees who are monitored (typically broker-dealers) and there may be other criteria as well.  One company recently asked about getting a feed of messages sent to/from their broker-dealers, but only messages sent to less than a dozen recipients. Presumably, the thought is that a message sent to many recipients likely doesn’t include the type of mischievous behavior they are looking for.   

I was once the Product Manager for the Veritas Compliance Accelerator product used with Enterprise Vault, so it isn’t pleasant to see people jump ship to a third party compliance solution, but it is certainly a benefit to Enterprise Vault customers to have options.   

If you need assistance getting more out of your Enterprise Vault investment, let us know. We’re happy to help. 

Into the Vault: Archive Accelerator Import

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Archive Accelerator Import

When companies need to import data into Enterprise Vault, at times it requires additional tools to get the job done. Thankfully, Veritas Enterprise Vault has arguably the most extensive API of any major archiving solution.

Initially, Vault Solutions LLC developed the Archive Accelerator Import feature for AVST™ Voicemail Archiving. It was developed with a plug-in architecture, making it easy to snap-in importers for any type of data format a customer might have – without the wait for a new version of Archive Accelerator to be released.

Typically, there are reasons that companies would need to use more than the standard tools: if they’re updating their systems, importing legacy EML or MSG files into Enterprise Vault, or if they are going through a merger or acquisition. In the latter situation, data needs to be moved from one system to the other and the two sets of archived data need to live together under the new organization.

When it comes to legacy data, there are usually other factors at play like file organization and the age of the data. Often the organizations that use Archive Accelerator Import are large. We recently completed a project for a multinational bank,  bringing 40 TB of legacy data into Enterprise Vault.

Archive Accelerator Import can be used to immediately import data from a data source or it can import data on a schedule. It keeps chain of custody information about all items imported and also keeps track of what has been imported to ensure against re-importing the same data. It can be set to automatically delete imported data after a defined period of time.

Archive Accelerator Import has grown over time from supporting AVSTTM Voicemail Archiving to importing many sources of data including EML, MSG, Discovery Accelerator, and others. While no migration is too small, the speed and efficiency with which AA Import completes significantly sized jobs makes it the ideal companion for large companies in need of moving critical data securely.

 

TRADEMARKS. AVST and/or other AVST products referenced herein are either registered trademarks or trademarks of AVST Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

The New Advantages of Export: Targeted Export and Enhanced Speed

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The New Advantages of Export

By David Ouellette

When I was product manager for Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator (CA) and Discovery Accelerator (DA) about 10 years ago, I worked with many large financial institutions that used those products in earnest (and of course, many still do).  They are both quite comprehensive products, and their many features are there due to customer demand.  Discovery Accelerator is typically used to respond to eDiscovery requests including criteria such as all messages with certain keywords, sent to or from a defined list of ‘custodians’, and/or over a particular date range.  DA has the flexibility to create a Case, create searches to put items into the Case, perform reviews of those items, and export relevant ‘responsive’ messages.

Discovery Accelerator does that task admirably, but several of our largest customers would ask me for an efficient way to export data with less administrative overhead, and with an emphasis on performance.  There were situations where they didn’t need the eDiscovery aspects of the product, but just needed a quick way to get a fair amount of data out of the system. They wanted a way to just export all data for a number of custodians for the last 6 months, for example.  The IT department would get a lot of requests like that, and though it can be done with DA, it takes more administrative work and time than it needs to.  We built our Archive Accelerator Export as a way to respond to the simple non eDiscovery requests.  In fact, Vault Solutions was commissioned by Symantec to create Archive Accelerator Export for a large customer that had 10’s of Terabytes of data to export, a task for which DA was not designed.  We’ve since sold it to many companies worldwide that had a simple need to export a lot of data from EV in as short a time as possible.

We built Archive Accelerator Export (AAE) to give companies the ability to conduct fast, highly robust mass exports of data from Enterprise Vault. Information can be exported for third-party analysis, taken offline for long-term storage, preserved in a non-proprietary format, or migrated to a separate archive for any number of reasons.

This past summer, we released the latest version of Archive Accelerator Export with several new features aimed at significantly improving functionality. We’re particularly excited about Targeted Export and its ability to be flexible with the data that’s being exported, especially in larger organizations.  Typically, the journal archive is a mix of everyone’s data, not organized or separated by any folder structure. It’s great when used for eDiscovery or compliance exercises, but doesn’t allow for granular data exports. Targeted Export allows for the efficient export of a particular user’s email from the journal archives, enabling you to target specific emails by person and date range rather than having to export the entire archive. In addition, large companies with more than one brand under their umbrella, or those that have changed names, can also search and export based on domain.

Although flexibility is a welcomed improvement, another crowd pleaser is speed. We optimized AAE’s performance by increasing speed with a new 64 bit architecture (see graphs). Whether exporting .MSG or .PST files, Archive Accelerator Export exports more gigabytes per hour than Discovery Accelerator.

 .pst files - gigabytes per hour
.msg files - gigabytes per hour

Worth noting in these visuals is the type of file, and the difference in export speed. In the same amount of time, AAE can export 32.7 GB of data in .MSG, and only 14.6 GB in .PST format. .MSG, which exports the data in individual messages, is 2x faster with Archive Accelerator Export than Discovery Accelerator, and nearly 3x faster than exporting in .PST, making it the preferred file type when possible.

It is sometimes impossible to avoid exporting .PST files, but when that’s the case, it’s important to note that in both formats, Archive Accelerator Export transfers at least 2x the data per hour than Discovery Accelerator.  Of course, all this being said, AAE is no replacement for DA when there is a need to perform other eDiscovery tasks such as keyword searching and document review and marking.

Read more to learn how Vault Solutions’ Archive Accelerator Export can help target the data you need to export.