C2C, a provider of email, file and messaging management solutions has announced that Aldermore Bank has adopted C2C’s ArchiveOne to achieve compliance and retrieval. The Bank, that has fast become one of the UK’s emerging financial institutions’ despite the current recessionary climate, operates across ten offices with a head office in Peterborough. The Bank has 600 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes. Primarily an online bank with over 90% of all our business communication conducted via email, it is critical that email is optimised, secure and fully retrievable at all times.
Like most large institutions, Aldermore Bank were facing growth issues – it sends and receives approximately 250,000 emails each month, and experiences a 20% growth rate every 6 months in the size and volume of emails. Through the Bank’s ongoing success and acquisition trail, employee numbers and mailboxes are estimated to rise by a further 25% in 2012. Compliance has always been a strong concern for the Bank, with identification and retrieval on-demand an ongoing concern to successfully adhere to the compliance requirements of the Financial Services Act.
Although day-to-day email retrieval requests were relatively infrequent, Mark Lockwood, Senior Systems Administrator, explained that when they did come in, the team could spend hours locating files. If a whole mailbox restore was required, it could take an entire day. Successful retrieval was wholly reliant on specific identification of the mailbox user and exact timing of when the mail was sent.
Email Archive Solution Required:
Recognising the need to implement a powerful, easy to use archiving system, Mark identified three email management companies, including C2C Systems, to demonstrate their solutions.
“Only ArchiveOne had the ability to search both live data and archive data – the others could only search the archive. In a 24/7 environment, that’s of critical importance.”
Upon rollout, two policies were established to suit Aldermore’s requirement to keep all email in perpetuity. ArchiveOne was set so that any email over 4MB in size was automatically sent to the archive; and any email that was over 90 days old was also transferred to the archive. At the backend, 3 date-based email data repositories were initially established to suit the historical infrastructure of the company. Early user experience endorsed Mark’s initial findings that ArchiveOne was simple to use without over complicating the process.
One of the first notable achievements from ArchiveOne was to discover PSTs across all users: The PST files are a result of Microsoft Outlook’s AutoArchive feature prompting users to store email data on local drives or network shared drives, making backup and restore extremely problematic. With ArchiveOne’s PST auto-management feature, these files were automatically pulled into the archive.
Growth challenges have also been addressed:- “The growing strain on our Exchange servers has now disappeared.” comments Mark. “The demand for storage as we have successfully archived all areas of the organisation has decreased by more than 60%.”
From a user perspective, there has been no appreciable difference in email usage – a key requirement. Users still see emails listed in inboxes or folders, but annotated with an ‘A’ symbol, to indicate that emails are stored centrally on the archive.
Compliance is now enforced. ArchiveOne stores a copy of every email sent or received at the Bank into a secure repository, enabling rapid message restore and providing a full audit trail. The fast retrieval is critical for the Bank, where, for instance, personnel have left and transactions may be subsequently questioned.
Looking Forward
The Bank experienced a 60% reduction in the size of the data set and the IT department anticipates a knock-on reduction in the migration timescales and costs. With Microsoft SharePoint on the roadmap ahead, Mark intends to implement C2C ArchiveOne for SharePoint to aid capacity, compliance, eDiscovery and retention management of data from the Microsoft SharePoint server.
Mark concludes: “The use of ArchiveOne throughout the Bank represents a dramatic improvement in the management of email. It really is an excellent solution from a UK-based highly knowledgeable team that has met our expectations on every level.”
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