 |
Public Accounting Firm Picks NearPoint for Compliance and Exchange Recovery |
"Compared to all the other big players for email archiving, Mimosa NearPoint |
|
Suby, Von Haden (SVA) is a fast growing public accounting firm with four offices and two Microsoft Exchange 2003 Servers supporting four hundred total email users. SVA's diverse business practice includes public accounting, computer consulting, financial services, and healthcare services. The financial services division of SVA falls under the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules for email archiving and is subject to yearly audits. The SVA healthcare services division falls under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ("HIPAA") and must also meet retention rules for email archival.
"At SVA, it is critical that all email records be managed properly to meet regulatory requirements and to also meet the business needs of our users," explained John Hutmacher, IT Director, Suby, Von Haden. "But we also needed a better solution for Exchange disaster recovery to replace the tape backup methods which we were not satisfied with. When we went shopping for an email archive solution, we were looking for both an email archiving solution and a solution for Exchange disaster recovery."
After reviewing other email archiving solutions, SVA was attracted to Mimosa NearPoint™ not only for email archiving but also for its unique ability to perform Exchange recovery. Using a continuous data protection technology based on Exchange transaction log files, NearPoint protects all Exchange data in real-time and performs fast, "one-click" recovery for Exchange at all levels. "I really liked the straight forward way that NearPoint captures Exchange information using the log files without any impact on Exchange Server and without requiring any agent software on Exchange," said Hutmacher. Using NearPoint SVA can restore Exchange databases, mailboxes or individual messages quickly and easily. "It is a piece of cake," said Hutmacher.
By having quick and reliable Exchange recovery in place with NearPoint, Hutmacher has more confidence to grow his total Exchange storage and allow for large mailboxes. "It is a given that my users want to keep everything and it is critical for our business that they do so. Email records are a vital part of our client communication and we are required to keep them by law," said Hutmacher. But the increasing demand to store email is growing the total Exchange Store sizes at SVA by 25% per year. The Mimosa NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature will be used by SVA to help reduce total Exchange storage and allow users "super-size" mailboxes. "I am just beginning to use the NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature and it will greatly help me manage my total Exchange storage," said Hutmacher. I have some users with 1GB size mailboxes and 500 MB is about my average size. Therefore it is very important that NearPoint help me manage large mailboxes. SVA also has email stored offline in .PST files. "In my opinion, .PST files are very unreliable and I discourage their use," said Hutmacher.
"Tackling the challenge of Exchange recover was my number one priority and NearPoint has delivered. My next challenge is to better manage my Exchange storage by reducing total Exchange storage and archiving offline .PST files," said Hutmacher. "I have been testing NearPoint's features for storage management and .PST archiving and the results have been impressive. Soon I will roll these features out to my entire organization. When I am complete, I expect to have met all of my major challenges for recovery and storage management using NearPoint."
The business and legal environments that SVA operates in demand compliance with strict rules and regulations. For its financial services, SVA must comply with yearly SEC audits. In these audits, random full-text searches may be performed on the email database. "The purpose of these audits is to determine if our records are being properly managed and if we can respond in a timely manner," said Hutmacher. In the past SVA granted rights for auditors to search multiple mailboxes on Exchange Server but this did not produce the necessary results. "We used to rely on Exchange Server for our audit searches," said Hutmacher, "but it was too easy to spoof. Because Exchange does not preserve deleted email information, it is worthless for compliance." Using NearPoint, SVA grants audit rights to its auditors, staff or supervisors and they can quickly perform a complete search of the email archive. "Using NearPoint, the archive data is always accessible and easily searchable," said Hutmacher.
Support for the SVA healthcare services was a bit different than those for financial services. While the SEC rules for email archive are clear, the HIPAA healthcare rules for email archival are less clear. "For SEC compliance, it was straight forward using NearPoint to enforce a ten year retention rule for all email records," said Hutmacher. "For HIPAA compliance, the rules were not very clear, so at the present time we are keeping all records until a retention period is determined." Similar to financial services, the supervisors and auditors for healthcare services are granted auditor privileges on NearPoint and can perform quick ad hoc search and discovery of the email archive. "Typically my supervisors use NearPoint to monitor work time, client checks with key word searches, policy enforcement and in general manage their direct reports," said Hutmacher.
© 2010 Iron Mountain Company. All rights reserved. 
