The Oval Group, UK Insurance Group, Selecting C2C

C2C Systems, Ltd announced that The Oval Group, a UK commercial insurance company, has adopted C2C's ArchiveOne Enterprise solution to achieve PST management and compliance across 26 offices and 1,200 employees using email to detail business information such as claims, risk assessments and financials.

The Oval Group's success has been fuelled by growth and acquisitions, resulting in disparate email servers that Mark Clayton, head of Business Services, set out to unite.

Remote offices were running various email servers causing availability and mailbox management concerns. Capacity issues were overcome by setting mailbox quotas so employees used the Auto Archive feature to create PSTs (Personal Storage Tables) that they could store locally or on any shared file system. Initial network scans revealed that PSTs were prolific, into the thousands, with some users having over 50GB of PST Files and others achieving around 10GB of PSTs stored randomly on servers, laptops and desktops. PSTs are recognised as being unstable; frequently becoming corrupt once they reach 2GB in size and are difficult to discover for compliance purposes. Neither for data protection, is it ideal to allow end users the choice of where to locate the files.

As with many Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulated companies, compliance is non-negotiable. Mark knew that best practice entailed keeping emails for at least ten years to support future investigations into claims data.

He elaborates: "We were aware that without the ability to index, search and find data quickly going back at least 7 years then we could be potentially exposed to falling outside of compliance requirements. The centralised email system would keep and track every email so that in the event of a claim query of any age and complexity, we could quickly locate and retrieve every corresponding email."

Several email management vendors were invited to demonstrate their solutions using a scoring model that revealed that ArchiveOne Enterprise was the suitable solution.

The Midlands data centre was the first back office installation with ArchiveOne deployed on dedicated virtual servers and integrated into the Groups' deployment of OWA (Outlook Web Access). In terms of repositories and policies that sit behind ArchiveOne, annual storage silos were designated and policies implemented that initially discover and identify all PSTs and then automatically transfer them into the archive store (long-term, the policy will be to disable users from being able to create PSTs at all). Users can also choose to archive PSTs themselves, valuable within an organisation where 50MB spreadsheets are not uncommon. In terms of archiving policies, for offices that contain heavy email usage, any email that is over 6 months old is automatically archived, with only the identification stub left intact to point towards the archived email.

Almost all offices now have access to ArchiveOne with minimal need for employee training. All new PCs and laptops now come preconfigured with the solution.

Using ArchiveOne, savings have been made by using secondary, cheaper storage. Primary disk storage costs £7,600 per TB and current analysis shows that 250GB of PSTs have recently been processed in the archive alone.

The transferal of PSTs into the archive each night has had operational savings as employees now have the ability to directly access historical email in an efficient manner rather than having to utilise the central support teams to recover emails. Mailbox sizes rarely exceed restrictive quotas as emails are compressed and archived. Compliance can be enforced with demonstrable best practices in place. Retrievals of emails are now restricted to a limited number of employees, who qualify investigation requests and are accountable for their actions.

Employee feedback has been positive, issues have been resolved without making any changes to the way they work. ArchiveOne now takes over the burden of mailbox management.

Mark summarises his ArchiveOne experience: "You always know when a good software solution is in play as it seamlessly controls tasks in the background with little cause for intervention. ArchiveOne falls into this category - feature for feature, the software meets or exceeds its competitors' solutions and the support is friendly and flexible."