REPORT: UNDERSTANDING THE VALUE OF SYMANTEC MANAGED.......... ENTERPRISE........... VAULT................... Understanding the Value of Symantec Managed Enterprise Vault Who should read this paper IT managers and decision makers who seek to get the most out of their Enterprise Vault solution and IT resources.
Content Executive Overview..................................................................................................... 1 The Challenges......................................................................................................... 1 The Solution........................................................................................................... 2 Realized Value......................................................................................................... 4 Summary.............................................................................................................. 5
Executive Overview Symantec Enterprise Vault enables organizations to create an information management strategy that links technology and policies for efficiency and process alignment across IT, legal, and business needs. Organizations are enabled to store, manage, and discover unstructured information across the organization including messaging systems, file servers, social media communications, and collaborative systems. Enterprise Vault classification and retention technologies enable organizations to add the intelligence to how they manage information. Having context and relevance helps organizations make better and consistent decisions as to when and what they archive and for how long they retain it better yet, when they can delete it. This consistency of policy enforcement protects corporate assets while enabling a repeatable and defensible discovery process and compliance with governance and industry regulations. Putting this intelligence around information management can cut the cost of storing unstructured information by up to 60% and reduce backup windows by up to 65%. Not only are efficiencies felt in the data center around storage optimization, application performance, and improved backups, but end-user productivity is also improved as mailbox quotas can be eliminated and personal archives and files on network drives can be archived and made accessible to end users while keeping the user experience intact. The time for intelligent information management is now; without it, storage costs spiral, information becomes harder to find, and legal, compliance and regulatory risks escalate. With the use of any archiving technology, it is imperative that IT organizations ensure that their archiving ecosystem is operating efficiently and within the design parameters of the chosen product in order to realize the full value of their technology investment. In Forrester s Q1 2011 Global Message Archiving Online Survey, only 31% of message archiving owners reported that they have confidence in their archived data. Symantec believes the other 69% lack this confidence due largely to the inherent neglect a non-core business application often receives and the respondents awareness of that fact. This document illustrates the compelling value of Symantec Managed Enterprise Vault for firms who require their archive environment and data remain on-premise, but want to maximize confidence in their archived data s integrity. The Challenges IT organizations that have chosen to take on archive administration in-house and are doing it right often have several dedicated resources assigned specifically to archiving in order to mitigate data confidence concerns. These resources can often be costly as they are extremely specialized and may be adjunct to the core proficiency of the customer s direct line of business. Specialized resources require specialized training and frequent refresher courses to maintain top-tier knowledge and expertise. If those specialized resources leave the organization, the company instantly loses the investment spent building that expertise and is then faced with the additional unforeseen costs of re-hiring and re-training. For companies that do not have assigned, dedicated resources, they often task their existing Mail Administrators to cross-train in the chosen archiving technology in a best effort attempt to know and understand the archiving process end-to-end. These individuals tend to be overutilized and often find themselves spread too thin to function at optimal levels for both archiving duties as well as their core proficiency of email administrative activities. Further complexity is introduced as additional features are enabled for archiving functionality such as ediscovery, Journaling, and Compliance. Regrettably, some organizations have neither dedicated nor assigned archiving personnel in any capacity either because they don t have the personnel bandwidth, or they are only beginning to adopt information archive technologies. 1
These scenarios induce a trickle-down effect whereby the archiving environment receives less attention than the important task of keeping information archived and available. Many organizations contend with these challenges: Staffing challenges Seasoned resources with archiving skills are difficult to find and retain Must keep skills current through incremental training Turnover erases the investment in an employee s training and skills Staff shortages Competing priorities which prevent staff from focusing on archiving and reaching expert status Elusive service levels Archiving solutions are often loosely managed Lack of service level agreements and performance metrics Lack of confidence in data integrity Archiving solution inefficiencies Hardware and resource inefficiencies Full value of archiving technology goes unrealized Policies are not well defined, enforced, or maintained Cost controls Difficulty achieving predictable costs Need to utilize existing resources for core revenue generating projects Companies taking an outsourced approach to some of their IT needs are looking to free themselves from daily application support and administration responsibilities to focus on the core capabilities that directly affect their business. The Solution Managed Enterprise Vault from Symantec s Business Critical Services (BCS) organization is a complete monitoring, management, and support solution for Symantec Enterprise Vault. This service is available specifically for customers who require or prefer to retain their data and archive environment on-premise and are looking to leverage the benefits associated with a remotely managed solution. IT departments will notice those benefits immediately, as Managed Enterprise Vault frees up their time and resources to concentrate on core business and strategic projects. This BCS offering is delivered in collaboration with the customer s IT team and provides an expert extension in the information archiving technology to the customer s Messaging Administration team. The key value of Managed Enterprise Vault is delivering a consistent service at a predictable cost with continuous improvements, proactive fault remediation, and issue avoidance. The key benefit to the customer is experiencing a higher quality of service from their Enterprise Vault application while virtually eliminating their involvement in daily Enterprise Vault activities. 2
Customers can expect to hand over the keys of their on-premise Enterprise Vault application usually within a matter of weeks. However, relinquishing the daily duties associated with Enterprise Vault does not mean giving up total control of the environment or the archived data itself. Managed Enterprise Vault plugs in to the archive environment remotely to enable 24x7 monitoring, incident remediation, and regular reporting providing the customer with a hands-off approach to application administration. This remote administrative solution allows the customer to retain their data in-house along with the retention of their CAPEX infrastructure investment and ultimate responsibility and control of their own underlying hardware and network infrastructure. Customers can expect to realize the full ROI benefits of Enterprise Vault through service level agreement adherence and automatic application upgrades that keep Enterprise Vault operating at maximum efficiency. Managed Enterprise Vault delivers to these strict service levels. Monthly Enterprise Vault application availability - Managed Enterprise Vault will achieve greater than 99.9% application availability for the Enterprise Vault application. Application Availability will be measured monthly by analyzing Enterprise Vault Reports. Enterprise Vault archiving rate - Managed Enterprise Vault will actively track the Enterprise Vault archiving rate which is expected to be a minimum throughput per Enterprise Vault server as outlined in the appropriate Enterprise Vault Performance Guide. The Enterprise Vault archiving rate is defined as the amount of archived data per server divided by the total duration at which Enterprise Vault is archiving data. If the Enterprise Vault Archiving Rate falls below the GB per hour as specified within the performance guide for the duration in which Enterprise Vault is archiving data, on two consecutive days, Managed Enterprise Vault will attempt to rectify the problem. If the root cause is suspected or deemed to be non- Enterprise Vault related, Managed Enterprise Vault will notify the customer and participate directly in resolution efforts. Monthly severity level response time service level - Managed Enterprise Vault will actively track and respond to issues related to Enterprise Vault and attempt to identify and resolve the underlying cause of the problem. For Priority 1 issues, defined as those issues with no workaround, where the use of a critical system is impossible in the production environment, or severely risks critical business operations, Managed Enterprise Vault will initiate remedy-focused triage within 15 minutes of problem awareness. Distribution of Management Reports - Managed Enterprise Vault will provide a monthly report which includes, but is not limited to: (1) Enterprise Vault application availability; (2) summary of past month s events (highlights, challenges, project summary); (3) Severity Level Response Time; (4) Archiving Rate. The table below represents the service level agreements provided by Managed Enterprise Vault: 3
Realized Value Each customer will derive their own unique measure of value from this offering. Some of these value points include: In circumstances where firms have dedicated personnel to message archiving responsibilities, Managed Enterprise Vault reduces costs. The customer can then reallocate these costs or resources elsewhere. Companies with over-tasked resources can redeploy them to core business and revenue generating projects. Predictable costs are realized as the effort to administer these environments is shifted away from the unpredictable fluctuations of headcount, training, and rehiring. Managed Enterprise Vault s pricing is directly and predictably associated with the number of servers administered. Peace of mind and confidence is provided by strict adherence to service level agreements and simply knowing the Enterprise Vault environment is administered by the vendor who created the application. Monthly reports provide full transparency inspiring confidence in the archiving environment and the archived data s integrity. Cost savings through annual Enterprise Vault upgrades. Managed Enterprise Vault provides annual upgrades to version releases eliminating the need for costly consulting engagements. Improved ROI of Enterprise Vault and satisfaction with the solution. Because of our close ties with the product team, Managed Enterprise Vault customers benefit from our first hand understanding of the new features and functions of Enterprise Vault. Cost savings for operations are driven by improving asset utilization, forecasting resource consumption, and delivering against a predictable, transparent cost model. These factors all help maximize value for the customer. Firms with a broader initiative to outsource non-core functions will see value in being able to do so with their archive environment. To apply some of these value points, one needs to understand the unique costs incurred by their line of business. Using a sample Enterprise Vault customer below, we ve applied some known quantitative values. Customer Scenario: Mailbox Archive Customer with Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator 12,000 mailboxes 3 Enterprise Vault Archive Servers + 1 Discovery Accelerator Server 1 dedicated resource + 2 part-time resources with other priorities = 2 FTE s 4
Additionally, Symantec Business Critical Services creates additional value by providing product expertise that is unique to Symantec. Examples include: Efficiently expiring data results in $800,000 saved An Enterprise Vault Specialist analyzed the age of a customer s archived data. Since all data was set for infinite retention, the customer wanted to evaluate the cost savings of changing their policy to expire data at various ages. The Enterprise Vault Specialist provided analysis and appropriate guidance to help the customer make the desired policy changes. As this is a customer with extremely large amounts of data, the end result was the expiration of approximately 40 terabytes of data valued at $800,000 in terms of storage costs. Reduced backup times and $59,500 saved An Enterprise Vault customer was not saving the space they had hoped for when they started using archiving. Preparations were underway to purchase additional archiving servers, tape drives for backup space, and disk space for performing a snapshot type solution. Before the company invested in a significant amount of additional hardware, Symantec s Enterprise Vault Specialist discovered Enterprise Vault was not configured correctly to remove safety copies after backups and large volumes of data were not being archived. The customer had a backup window of 4 hours and backups were running over 10 hours on some servers. The result was that some backups never finished. The Enterprise Vault Specialist advised the customer to switch to Flash Backup with trigger files. This recommendation resulted in backup times decreased to under 2 hours thus clearing the backlog of items awaiting backup. This resulted in an approximate hardware cost savings of $59,500. 18% reduction in stored data and $20,000 saved A customer prepared to make an investment in additional storage to address a growing capacity issue. Symantec s Enterprise Vault Specialist analyzed the customer s Enterprise Vault configuration and discovered they were retaining data already tagged by users to be deleted. This is a common side-effect of a specific configuration but not anything broken. Rather, the customer just wasn t aware of how this specific routine worked. The remedy in this situation resulted in an approximate 18% reduction in stored data, or roughly 1 terabyte. Storage costs savings were $20,000. Smooth migration and approximately $200,000 saved A customer s IT organization hired a consulting vendor to perform migrations of much of their hardware infrastructure to VM servers. A Symantec Enterprise Vault Specialist reviewed the vendor s migration plan for Enterprise Vault and provided feedback consistent with Symantec Best Practices and known methodologies. The end result was a smooth transition from 12 physical Enterprise Vault archiving servers to 12 Enterprise Vault instances running on 4 physical servers. The customer realized approximately $200,000 in hardware savings and a smooth migration. Summary Managed Enterprise Vault is designed to help customers realize the full potential of their Enterprise Vault implementation. Through vigilant 24x7 monitoring, incident remediation, and the application of best practices, customers can be assured their archiving solution has optimal performance and their archived data is safe and secure. By deploying Managed Enterprise Vault, customers can enjoy the peace of mind that comes from having the solution manufacturer managing their archiving environment. 5
About Symantec Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage, and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com. For specific country offices and contact numbers, please visit our website. Symantec World Headquarters 350 Ellis St. Mountain View, CA 94043 USA +1 (650) 527 8000 1 (800) 721 3934 www.symantec.com Copyright 2012 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec Logo, and the Checkmark Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 5/2012 21254713