Archiving and Compliance

Increased Scrutiny of Email From eDiscovery and Regulatory Compliance
With the popularity of email as a primary means of communication for business comes an increased scrutiny of email for eDiscovery purposes. Because email messages make up a significant portion of the daily communications of almost any large organization, they have become the focal point of attorneys on both sides of a lawsuit, making the need for accurate, timely response to discovery requests critical.  But the difficulty and expense of extracting and producing individual messages that are both relevant and not privileged from the millions of messages in a user’s .pst files – or worse yet from a company’s backup tapes – can be astronomical.  This has led to explosive growth in the email archival market as a cost effective means of addressing the eDiscovery needs of enterprises in all industries.

In addition to eDiscovery concerns, a growing number of industry regulations and national laws explicitly or implicitly require enterprises to better manage, secure, store and archive their email messages. Some of these regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, apply to public companies in all industries and are even followed by many private companies looking to be acquired or file for an IPO. Other regulations, such as HIPAA, Basel II and FISMA apply to specific industries – in this case healthcare, banking and government, respectively.

If legal compliance compels your organization to retain all email messages, you may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more on archival software, servers and the storage necessary to retain all of the email messages, often including messages containing spam or other unwanted content. Some, faced with the potential costs of email archival simply adopt the dubious policy of purging all email beyond a certain date, putting the organization at even greater risk.

Mirapoint RazorSafe can Help Organizations Meet eDiscovery and Regulatory Compliance Requirements

The Mirapoint RazorSafe™ from Mirapoint, when functioning with the Mirapoint Message Server and RazorGate appliances can meet these requirements by passively and discretely copying all messages sent or received within an organization, indexes the messages and places them into a permanent archive. The message archive is backed up securely to tape and then deleted from the originating journal mailbox.

Later, the RazorSafe's high-speed search capabilities allow reviewers to discover messages based on sender, recipient, subject, keyword and date range. Marked messages can be exported in a securely in common *.eml format.  The entire archival and search process can be conducted securely without alerting or disrupting users. The archive message base is not modifiable, and all actions by administrators or by the RazorSafe itself are recorded in a secure audit log.

Key Benefits

• Simple appliance approach to email archival allows plug and play deployment
• All storage hardware, software and operating system in a single 1u chassis
• Simple POP interface to the journal mailbox(es) allows the archival system to work in the background without disrupting email system performance
• When used with the Mirapoint RazorGate appliance, messages can be archived by department, inbound, outbound, sender, receiver or any number of filter criteria
• Simple web-based user and search interface for all functions make the RazorSafe simple and secure
• External tape library system sold separately (strongly recommended)

How the Mirapoint RazorSafe Solution Works

Special archival journal interfaces are activated on the Mirapoint RazorGate and/or Mirapoint Message Server. A variety of filters can be applied to these interfaces to journal only specific types of messages or to place messages with differing content or headers into different secure folder locations.

One or more RazorSafe's log into these journal folders at a pre-set interval and collect the messages for indexing via a pop client interface. Messages indexed and stored in the archival message base are backed up to tape at a regular interval (typically nightly) automatically. Messages on the tape are secured using private 256-bit encryption. Once the messages are indexed and archived to tape, the original messages are deleted from the archival folder, completing the archival process.

Competitive Advantages of RazorSafe

• RazorSafe combines all of the hardware and software you need for a plug and play archival solution into a single appliance. Competitive solutions require you to piece together the solution be buying server hardware, storage, software and operating system separately.
• Mirapoint's policy control and filtering capabilities allow administrators to capture both inbound and outbound messages and organize the archive by sender, recipient, department or keywords. Competitive solutions archive all messages in one batch.
• Mirapoint's RazorGate with MailHurdle and RAPID dramatically decrease the percentage of spam going into the archive by blocking that spam at the edge, before it ever reaches the email system. This dramatically reduces the processing and storage requirements for the email archival system over competitive approaches.
• A passive non-real time method to separating the messages for indexing and archival reduces workload on the organization's mailstore and maintains the archive function transparently. Competitive solutions make their presence known to users by marking messages taken out of the user's mailbox or by burdening the mailstore with a performance load.

To learn more request a copy of our white paper “Meeting the Challenge of Email Security and Regulatory Compliance.” Or contact us at 800-937-8118 or via email at info@mirapoint.com.