The State of Delaware Goes from Reactive to Proactive
“After looking at all the large players, we selected Mimosa because it was the only unified solution for eDiscovery, storage optimization, and disaster recovery.” — Douglas Lilly, Lead Telecom Technologist, Department of Technology and Information for the State of Delaware

Background

The State of Delaware was the nation’s first of the 13 original states to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 7, 1787. Thomas Jefferson once nicknamed Delaware “The Diamond State” because he described it as a “jewel” among states due to its strategic location on the Eastern Seaboard. While just 1,982 square miles in size, Delaware is today home to more than 783,600 state residents. With a motto of “liberty and independence” the state serves its growing population through numerous state agencies, from its legislative and judicial branches to its state departments such as its Department of Health and Social Services, all which rely heavily upon email communication to conduct daily business.

Business Situation

As a state that values adherence to strong data protection policies, the State of Delaware had
adopted a self-mandated state litigation retention policy which called for the retention of all email data for a one year period. To retain the volumes of this large and growing data, the state had a backup and disaster recovery software solution that was adequate for information protection. But, the backup solution could not perform the sophisticated electronic discovery search and recovery tasks the state required.

“While we had a backup solution already, it wasn’t robust enough for our eDiscovery search and recovery needs,” said Douglas Lilly, lead telecom technologist, Department of Technology and Information for the State of Delaware. “We needed a more proactive approach that could capture everything including calendar items, messages, tasks, and item histories.”

In addition to requiring a more feature-rich solution for eDiscovery, The State of Delaware wanted an email archiving solution that would eliminate journaling and have no impact on its Exchange server and email performance. It also wanted to ensure that the system would reliably capture complete conversation threads across mailboxes and automatically trace to:, from:, cc:, and bcc: characteristics for each email. This would enable The State of Delaware to answer key legal discovery questions such as “who read what and when?”

The Mimosa NearPoint Solution

As the State of Delaware began its search for an email archiving solution that could offer the comprehensive features it needed, it became clear to them that most solutions on the market take a limited first-generation technical approach. Based on a recommendation from Microsoft, the State of Delaware included Mimosa NearPoint in its evaluation process.

“After looking at all the large players, we soon selected Mimosa because it was the only unified solution for eDiscovery, storage optimization and disaster recovery,” said Lilly. “All the other vendors took an antiquated approach using Journaling. But Mimosa eliminates journaling with zero overhead on Exchange.”

Featuring a Multi-Node Grid Architecture, Mimosa NearPoint was built to assure zero Exchange overhead while offering the reliability and scalability to support systems ranging from 100 to tens of thousands of mailboxes in a single system. The archiving solution delivers archiving, eDiscovery, recovery, disaster recovery, and storage management in a single integrated solution that gives the State of Delaware all the features they needed. In addition, the product’s Self-Service Access™ feature enables employees throughout the State of Delaware to easily access and retrieve their own lost email data, dramatically reducing the need for IT staff support.

Results

By implementing Mimosa NearPoint, the State of Delaware has streamlined its email archiving process while assuring that it can easily administer its selfmandated state litigation retention policy. With Mimosa NearPoint, the State of Delaware has:

• Expedited the eDiscovery process by leveraging complete content capture, including individual item-level legal holds, conversation and proximity analysis, and an intuitive search within a search—while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the workflow.
• Captured all of its metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks, so relevant content can be quickly identified as part of an eDiscovery or disclosure request.
• Seamlessly aligned its email storage resources based on the state’s growing needs.
• Archived its email data based on policies of age and size, which has reduced overall storage requirements.
• Features that now allow users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook. In addition, NearPoint allows the state’s administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with a simple “one-click” operation.

The next step for the State of Delaware will be to use Mimosa’s PST Archiving Option to eliminate PST files that are risking data corruption on users’ systems. The NearPoint option crawls and uploads PST files to the NearPoint archive, where they are centrally managed and searched for email discovery. The State of Delaware’s PST files can then be automatically deleted after they are uploaded to the archive or remain as files managed by NearPoint.

“The elimination of PST files we be another thing we will tackle using Mimosa NearPoint,” added Lilly. “I know Mimosa will be there to address our near term and long term goals with technology that is truly next-generation.”

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