Archiving E-Discovery Supplement to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Offers Legal Hold

By Stephanie Jordan
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As already widely reported, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 offers archive features. Archiving solution vendors have been working on ways to support Exchange 2010 and yet also differentiate from what Microsoft now includes. Proofpoint is one such vendor, and this week it announced a major upgrade to its SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) email archiving solution, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive, an enterprise-grade solution that helps organizations reduce legal discovery risk and costs. According to the company, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive provides a secure, searchable repository of all email messages and enables organizations to easily and consistently perform early case assessments, instantly preserve data in active legal holds and enforce retention policies.

“There has been a lot of interest in companies around e-Discovery in general and legal hold capabilities as it relates to Exchange 2010,” says Andres Kohn, general manager, archiving for Proofpoint. “What we are hearing from customers is that while Exchange 2010 has gone a long way in reducing the burden of large mail boxes, and in many ways reducing the need for archiving to do mailbox management, it has not provided an easy way to put data on legal hold. That is where solutions like ours are migrating towards compliance and e-Discovery. We have done a lot of work around that capability.”

In addition to full support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, including support for Microsoft Outlook Web Access, access to stubbed attachments and advanced search capabilities, and support for mixed environments that use multiple Microsoft Exchange server versions including 2003, 2007 and 2010, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive now offers near real-time e-Discovery search. The product can take not only historical data, but can also automatically put new data, as it is being sent and received, on hold so you can keep an ongoing sampling of current data for a litigation matter.

Another new feature is support for EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) XML, which helps improve interoperability and the transfer of electronically stored information between applications involved in different phases of the discovery process. “There are many solutions across different steps,” explains Kohn. “We are the source for all email that the company has sent and received. If there is a pending litigation and they need to produce data to opposing council, the company has to cull through and find the relevant data and send it to an e-Discovery tool, and then go through the full review, before presenting to opposing council. So we can facilitate that transfer of data.”

When does a company need to consider a solution like Proofpoint Enterprise Archive? If a company expects just one lawsuit a year, Kohn believes it may not be worth it. “However, if a company thinks it may get two or more lawsuits a year, the costs of dealing with those are so high, having an archiving solution in place is really beneficial,” he says.

Kohn also notes that there are very few companies that don’t feel like archiving is something they should do, but companies have not justified the work. But that seems to be changing, “We are seeing IT budgets starting to open up and greater pressure around e-Discovery and legal holds. One reason for the reluctance is the perceived high cost to archiving, and that is where SaaS archiving comes in. There are no up front costs, but security is a concern. A Proofpoint benefit is that we have a hybrid model, with an appliance that sits on the customers premises that holds an encryption key, so that the data going out to the cloud is encrypted.” Kohn points out that Proofpoint does not have the key. “All that data is impossible for us to read. The user can search through that encrypted data from their Web browser and be able to get results back as if it wasn’t encrypted. That has been a real differentiator for us.”

While Exchange 2010 is a main focus of this announcement, moving forward Kohn says that Exchange is just one source of data. “We estimate that 80 percent of all discoveries are towards email, but lately we are seeing a lot more e-Discovery from other data sources—whether it be Sharepoint or file servers or instant messaging communications. Our archive and legal hold capabilities will move from just being on email to other data sources.”

The new version is available now with beginning pricing at $30 (USD) per user per year, including support and storage.

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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com

Published August 13, 2010