Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving and Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud Introduction According to The Radicati Group, email has become one of businesses most critical assets and with worldwide email traffic projected to grow to 507 billion messages per day by 2013 managing email has never been more challenging. Not only do employees need access to their email accounts to conduct business efficiently, they must also manage historical copies of email to comply with current regulatory requirements. Businesses today are required to have the ability to easily place legal holds on emails and conduct efficient e-discovery if faced with a lawsuit. Technical Whitepaper Authored by: Loryan Strant Microsoft Office 365 MVP www.thecloudmouth.com Who should read this paper: CIOs, CFOs, IT Managers, IT Decision Makers, Legal and Risk Management Officers and HR Managers IT departments without an email archiving solution in place may find themselves spending a disproportionate amount of time and funds managing an increasing volume of email and responding to labor intensive search and retrieval requests from corporate compliance, legal, the office of the CIO, and company employees. Turning to the cloud to address these needs has been the direction of many businesses for the past two years. According to McKinsey & Company, cloud storage and archiving can reduce up to 75 percent on infrastructure and hardware costs - helping businesses to focus and invest more on their core strengths. Overview This white paper aims to discuss the strengths between 2012 GartnerMagic Quadrant leader Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud and the emerging product Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving by delving into nine factors that businesses should take into consideration before deciding to choose an email and storage solution: Licensing, Infrastructure, Deployment, Performance & Availability, Administration & Integration, User Interface, E-Discovery, Migration and Support. Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud is a cloud-based storage and archiving service that provides a scalable solution to help organizations comply with legal and government standards. Enterprise Vault.cloud caters to a very diverse technology market and is a leading solution partner for Exchange Server both on-premises and hosted owing from its enterprise-grade level of archiving and compliance measures. Enterprise Vault.cloud also supports older versions of Microsoft Exchange Server and the superseded BPOS platform. Deciding on the Best Email Archiving and ediscovery solution for Microsoft Office 365 www.paradyne.com.au 1
Licensing Exchange Online Archiving can be subscribed-to as a supplemental archiving platform for Exchange Online (available in some Office 365 suites) or Exchange Server on-premises. However a limitation of this is that upon termination of an employee the organization would need to continue to pay for the EOA license in order to keep the archive still active. Comparatively Enterprise Vault.cloud continues to retain user archives at no extra cost* it only charges for active users. *Client must stop journaling for inactive mailboxes, and inactive mailbox must be marked as disabled in the archive. Note: Client must have Microsoft Enterprise Exchange Client Access Licenses (CALs) that enable per mailbox journaling. Infrastructure The cloud provider's infrastructure is the cornerstone of a successful cloud archiving and storage initiative. It determines how much data can be stored and archived, if it can be recovered at the event of a disaster and if resources can easily be scaled if more storage is needed. Costs for doing this for any organization can be considerable however as service providers both Microsoft and Symantec already adhere to these in order to be able to offer their services to their clients. Simply put: both Microsoft and Symantec provide greater levels of security and compliance than most organizations could afford to implement themselves. A key component of cloud is the cost of storage. While organizations may believe that providing an archive onpremises is cheaper when comparing license costs this may not always be the case when factoring in the costs of acquiring, implementing and supporting the underlying infrastructure. Both Symantec and Microsoft offer an unlimited storage for archival, automatic provisioning, and georedundant data replication. By implementing high availability solutions, customers are able to maintain resilient clouds, implement local or global recovery and data replication. Deployment Both Microsoft and Symantec solutions require minimal setup and configuration to begin functional usage. While small amount of configuration work must be done in both systems portals, as well as some configuration on the customer mail server Symantec offers consultancy, implementation guidance and project management to assist with the process at no extra cost. Performance and Availbility To assist with rapid adoption and use, Enterprise Vault.cloud offers an average of one to two hours of indexing time and fast discovery search time of a few seconds; while end-user search time also average a few seconds. These figures are not disclosed for EOA. Deciding on the Best Email Archiving and ediscovery solution for Microsoft Office 365 www.paradyne.com.au 2
Both Microsoft & Symantec offer Service Level Agreement uptimes for their respective products. Symantec provides a Service Level Agreement (SLA) stating 99.99% availability for Enterprise Vault.cloud, whilst Microsoft SLA is of 99.9%. Administration & Integration At a basic level both EOA and Enterprise Vault.cloud provide relatively similar administration and integration interfaces: Active Directory user synchronization Single sign-on with Active Directory Federation Services Web interface A point of differentiation however is that Microsoft also makes available administration via the Exchange Management Console (in the case of hybrid deployments) Remote PowerShell access, as well as the Exchange Web Services API allowing customers to interact with EOA via GUI, command line and scripts or with custom built applications. Conversely while both Symantec and Microsoft provide online technical documentation and help pages to perform administration, Symantec can provide additional FREE 1:1 basic training for new customers, if required. User Interface Enterprise Vault.cloud offers an intuitive user interface. Unlike EOA, it enables users to access all messages sent/received and even deleted, perform multiple types of searches and consequently save them. Enterprise Vault.cloud also allows users to handle restore messages from their archive back to the Inbox. E-Discovery E-Discovery is one of the most important archiving functions required for corporate compliance. The data included in e-discovery can comprise of any electronically stored information, including emails and instant messages, which can be used as evidence in the event of a lawsuit. In comparing Enterprise Vault.cloud and EOA e-discovery, it is evident that Enterprise Vault.cloud provides a greater number of features including granting Legal direct access to archived messages. In addition, Enterprise Vault.cloud offers an iterative search experience so that the person conducting the search can plus and minus search criteria vs. having to re-do a form search each time. EOA only offers form search. For example, unlike EOA which can only provide mailbox legal hold, Enterprise Vault.cloud allows message-level legal holds and enables a collaborative discovery workflow for multiple internal and external (e.g., outside counsel) reviewers. Deciding on the Best Email Archiving and ediscovery solution for Microsoft Office 365 www.paradyne.com.au 3
Function Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) Enterprise Vault. Cloud (EV.cloud) Global search Case management No Delegate search-specific rights No Delegate third party access No Set expiration of delegated access No Case management rights control No through different permission levels Enable distributed case review No, a case can be distributed to different reviewers Data export formats PST PST, NSF, EML, EDRM XML Proactive search alerts No Role based access Search by date (i.e. on and after, between, on and before) Search through wildcard in subject, email address, body Search by keyword Identify if message has an attachment Search by attachment name or type Search by From, To, CC,BCC Search by sender or recipient Search emails for users with changed names No Search emails of a non-active email account No Search calendar entries No (raw format) Enterprise Vault.cloud offers all discovery functionalities needed for corporate compliance: different types of searches, case management, role-based access control and different types of file export handling. EOA on the other hand, still primarily dependent to Exchange Online and Server to deliver the same level of functionality. Migration Data migration or the process of moving data between storage systems and formats is generally a tedious task that businesses must deal with when moving to a cloud storage or solution. An effective data migration procedure requires mapping from the old system to the new system allowing a new system design for data extraction and loading. The migration capabilities of Enterprise Vault.cloud are more mature than those available in EOA. In the same manner, it also allows direct ingestion of different email formats such as EML, NSF and PST (with or without folder structure). Deciding on the Best Email Archiving and ediscovery solution for Microsoft Office 365 www.paradyne.com.au 4
Support Like many other Cloud services provider, both Microsoft and Symantec provide 24x7 technical support for their respective archival products which is included in the monthly subscription fee. Symantec support is a known for delivering 98% customer satisfaction rate. Conclusion Choosing an email and archiving solution requires reviewing a combination of factors. Whilst the solution from both Microsoft and Symantec offers the solution in similar forms, it is worthwhile to evaluate the importance of your organization meeting legal and compliance requirements. For any organization considering an archiving solution, it is also important to understand the difference between archiving and journaling. EOA s in place archiving relies on end users to know what they should archive or delete. Depending on end users means that messages that could eventually be part of a legal request may be deleted without ever being captured. Microsoft s workaround for this is to have the Exchange Admin puts the user s entire mailbox on legal hold. However, putting an entire mailbox on hold can be an inconvience to users because it forces them to save unwanted messages, such as junk email. Enterprise Vault.cloud removes the archiving burden from end users and ensures that each organization s archive is forensically sound and defensible by journaling a copy of all messages to Symantec s secure, private and redundant, multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. Based on feature comparison between the two products, Enterprise Vault.cloud is the clear solution for those businesses looking for more advanced archiving and e-discovery capabilities in order to satisfy specific requirements. Enterprise Vault.cloud when bundled with Office 365 provides a powerful email archiving and advance e-discovery solution for any businesses regardless of the size. Deciding on the Best Email Archiving and ediscovery solution for Microsoft Office 365 www.paradyne.com.au 5