26 CIO Digest July 2008

The evolution of IT over the past 25 years is mind-boggling.

When Mark Olsen, the director of controls and compliance at Mitel, graduated from Harvard and began his journey in IT in the early 1980s, he had little idea of what lay in store for him.

While working for a major cable company early in his career, Olsen was asked to oversee a project to purchase IBM worksta-tions (at about $13,000 per machine), load Lotus 1-2-3 on them, and then roll them out to a small constituency of end users. A

few years later, he proposed another project involving nascent technology: installation of a 60-node LAN with

cc:Mail as one of the key applications.Email volume and resulting storage demands have

grown at the virtual speed of sound since the “days of cc:Mail,” and the challenges associated with email have burgeoned beyond what was ever thought possible. When Olsen was recruited in 2005, Mitel, which provides communications solutions for organizations of all sizes around the world, had recently settled several lawsuits. The CEO and CIO consequently sought out Olsen with the mandate to identify and implement a solution that would institute an email retention policy. “They told me that we had a huge problem with email,” remembers Olsen. “We could not keep it forever. Email is not a docu-ment management system. Their edict to me was “to go figure it out.”

Getting started Olsen recognized the importance of using business process man-agement to identify the appropriate retention policies before search-ing for and selecting a technology solu-tion. As a result, Mitel retained the services of Greenberg Traurig, LLP, an international law firm, to review two email and e-discovery policy drafts. The first, titled “Electronic Com-munications Policy,” addressed appropriate

and inappropriate use of email. The second, the “Email Retention and Disposition Policy,” outlined parameters around the default time that email can be retained. For email retention, five different types of retention poli-cies were pinpointed.

The retention default is now six months, though all employees are given the option of 18 months. Any employee seeking to retain email for longer than 18 months must demonstrate a valid business require-ment and, if approved by the company’s compliance officer, email retention for the employee in question may be extended beyond 18 months. “A large percent-age of the requests are turned down,” explains Lisanne Cottington, the director of global ethics and compliance at Mitel. “Most employees simply aren’t able to build a business case for longer retention periods.” For Mitel’s senior-level management team (director and above) and its HR and legal departments that deal with situa-tions where there are legal or regulatory requirements for longer email retention periods, three and seven

NORTH AMERICA

Talk About Email Retention Policy

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Business Processes Combined with Technology Deliver the Right Solution

By Patrick E. Spencer

symantec.com/ciodigest 27

year policies, as well as permanent retention policies, were created.

In 2005, Mitel attempted to implement an alternative solution to Symantec Enterprise Vault. “The level of technical support [of the alternate solution] was not up to the standards we expected,” Olsen re-ports. Further investigation pushed the company towards Enterprise Vault, which “was consistently in the top mindshare of leading industry analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.” A final decision was made in late March 2006.

Technical documentation as the solution foundationFollowing a period of planning and assessment, Mitel embarked on designing, testing, and developing the email archiving and e-discovery environment with the assistance of Symantec Consulting Services. Part of the process involved the develop-ment of detailed technical docu-mentation, which was used for the test and development environment as well as for the production roll out. “The technical documentation, which is nearly 350 pages, provides us with a detailed roadmap for re-creating the system in the event of a disaster,” Olsen explains.

Full system deployment of Enterprise Vault occurred in early October 2006. Enterprise Vault Microsoft Exchange Journaling was rolled out across an initial 2,600 Microsoft Exchange seats, enabling automated 30-day archiving of all end-user email. Discovery Accelerator was deployed to several select users in the legal department, allow-ing them to manage e-discovery re-quests and place legal holds by flag-ging responsive emails for retention until a particular case is resolved.

Digesting the PST file ingestionBut the work was just beginning, as Mitel’s IT team turned their attention to ingesting more than 8,000 PST files spread across 2,600 individual end users and then ap-plying the new policy to them.“This

was probably one of the most difficult IT projects I’ve managed,” Olsen notes, “not because of technical issues, but because of policy issues. It was particularly difficult when users realized they could not keep 10 years of email any longer.”

Focused on issues of cost, the company didn’t want to continue purchasing more and more storage to accommodate its growing mounds of email data. “We couldn’t continue buying more and more disks,” Olsen says. “Storage is not free, and it doesn’t scale infinitely, especially when it comes to Microsoft Exchange email.”

In order to educate end users, Mitel’s IT team built a two-hour training module that was manda-tory for all employees and contrac-tors to complete. At the same time, in early 2007, they also formed an E-mail Retention Steering Commit-tee comprised of Olsen, Cottington, and Jon Klassen, the vice president of U.S. applications. The steer-ing committee was tasked with making final policy decisions on email retention and responding to employee questions and concerns. PST file ingestion, along with the mandatory training module, started with the approximately 700 users in Mitel’s Arizona offices in March 2007. The rollout continued to each of the company’s 60 branch offices between April 2007 and January 2008. During each on-site visit, the deployment team also standardized endpoint security on Symantec AntiVirus Enterprise Edition and the Payne Metadata

Assistant from Payne Consulting on every user’s desktop and laptop.

“When you talk about business value, one of the main reasons we visited the desktop was because of the need to harvest the PST files,” Olsen explains. “Now, with all of the PST files in a centralized storage system, we can attest with complete assurance that we have accounted for all email, and that we are 100 percent compliant with legal discov-ery search requests.”

Achieving a fast ROIEarlier this year, the Mitel team leveraged an additional tool from the Enterprise Vault toolbox. The

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Provider of Unified Communications for the Real World: Mitel

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Mark Olsen, Director of Controls and Compliance, Mitel

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legal department required data for more than 30,000 different emails related to a lawsuit.

“Instead of outsourcing the task, the IT team suggested that we use File System Archiving, com-bined with the recently completed PST migration, to ingest all of the emails and files into a centralized archive with full-text indexing,” Olsen says.

The Mitel team then deployed Discovery Accelerator to the five legal staff assigned the e-discovery task. Mitel General Counsel Greg Hiscock

summarizes the business value: “By avoiding the cost of outsourcing the task, we paid for half the cost of the entire Enterprise Vault deployment with this single legal case.”

Delivering huge business valueThis is just one of the areas of busi-ness value Mitel has realized from the email archiving and e-discovery solution.1 When the initial deploy-ment began, the company had recently upgraded its ERP and

Microsoft Exchange storage envi-ronments from an EMC CX700 stor-age system to an EMC Symmetrix SAN. Enterprise Vault’s heteroge-neous support for various storage systems and devices allowed Mitel to leverage this newly available storage space—nine terabytes—and thus avoid an additional storage hardware acquisition.

Removal of shortcuts shaved Microsoft Exchange storage by ap-proximately 19 percent—from 1.05 terabytes to 850 gigabytes for a one-time storage saving of $9,000. In addition, the aggregate Microsoft Exchange and PST files and journal-ing archive store was reduced 37 percent, generating $50,000 in one-time savings. And once the email expiry is activated later this year, the archive store will shrink by an estimated 60 percent, equating to $64,000 in one-time storage recap-ture. All of the storage reallocation savings add up to $123,000. And this doesn’t account for risk reduc-tion: expired email, which has been deleted from storage based on a documented retention policy, is no longer stored indefinitely. Finally, Mitel is now able to assure proper legal holds are placed for any active matters, thus avoiding penalties and sanctions from the courts under the new rules of civil procedure.

Elimination of email quotas is saving end users up to 20 minutes each week, time they previously spent deleting their email and/or managing their PST folders. Assum-ing 240 workdays each year, this translates to approximately $700,000 in labor productivity improvements. On a related note, the IT staff is spending less time helping end users to resolve email quota problems.

The largest area of business value for Mitel is e-discovery. Previously, legal discovery was a tedious, time-consuming task that sometimes took weeks to fulfill. With Enterprise Vault, the Mitel team has reduced the time to fulfill these discovery requests to a matter of minutes, resulting in millions of dollars in potential labor productivity gains. And this doesn’t even include additional cost avoidance achieved from not needing to retain costly external legal search firms.

Looking aheadMitel is now planning to extend email archiving and e-discovery to the remainder of employees who are converting from an IBM Lotus Notes system. Simon Thompson, vice president of IT, elaborates: “We were impressed with the opportunity Enterprise Vault presents, and we plan to deploy it across the balance of the Mitel organization.”

“We see email and document archiving and e-discovery as a project that really never ends,” Olsen concludes. “There is data in other areas of the business to which we want visibility, and we want to ensure we are 100 percent compli-ant with all legal discovery requests by identifying and archiving it.” n

Patrick E. Spencer (Ph.D.) is the editor in chief for CIO Digest and the author of a book and various articles and reviews published by Continuum Books and Sage Publications, among others.

1 The quantified business value is based on research conducted by The Alchemy Solutions Group.

28 CIO Digest July 2008

> Symantec Enterprise Vault withDiscovery Accelerator, PST Migrator,Offline Vault, File System Archiving,Microsoft Mailbox Archiving, and

Microsoft Exchange Journaling

> Symantec Consulting Services

> Symantec Education Services

> Symantec Essential SupportServices

Talking Up Symantec at Mitel

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“We could not keep it forever. Email is not a document management system. ”— Mark Olsen, Director of Controls and Compliance, Mitel

January 2006: Codification of email retention and e-discovery policies

March 2006: Selection of Symantec Enterprise Vault

October 2006: Deployment of Symantec Enterprise Vault

March 2007: Ingestion of PST files and email archival training for 700 employees in Arizona office

January 2008: Completion of PST file ingestion and email archival training for 60 branch offices

June 2008: Activation of expiry policy

February 2009 (projected): Migration of Mitel email accounts and Lotus Notes archives to Symantec Enterprise Vault

Implementing Email Archiving and e-Discovery

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