Manufacturing, Design, Technology

The Challenges

Retaining Business-Critical Intelligence

Statistics show that more than 60 percent of critical corporate information is contained in employees' emails. This is especially true for manufacturing, design, and technology firms, where intellectual property, product designs, and blueprints are emailed back and forth constantly. Engineers exchange product designs and product development roadmaps. Technical support teams exchange critical information with corporate clients or collect private information from users via email. Sales gurus send and receive contracts or confirm quotes and business development details with prospective customers.

When a business's functioning rests on the ability to retain emails, attachments, and electronic files, it is not surprising that these companies need an archive to securely retain vital data for back up, disaster recovery, and, of course, compliance purposes. Many companies have already recognized that it is imperative for them to store this high-value corporate intelligence, but doing so presents many practical difficulties. While the content of emails and electronic files are of high importance to manufacturing, design and technology companies, IT administrators in these industries must consider the effects of trying to maintain large volumes of emails, attachments and files on their primary servers.

Storage Management

Osterman Research's statistics demonstrate that the typical message user sends and receives 25,000 emails annually. Add to massive quantities of emails the large sizes of most attachments sent in the manufacturing, design, and technology industries-high resolution images of design plans, long proposals, and lengthy contracts all use large amounts of email server storage space-and the servers will start to buckle under the load. Eventually, employees may need to wait hours to download important attachments because the server is overloaded with stored emails and attachments. In the worst cases, servers can crash and cause critical information to be lost forever.

Many companies try to mitigate risks by backing up emails and files daily or weekly on backup tapes or storage hardware, which will not capture data that employees may have (accidentally) deleted. While backup tapes and multiple storage hardware devices are acceptable short-term solutions to high volume storage growth, constantly buying new storage hardware can get expensive; managing all this data can also eat up a large amount of human and financial resources. These storage solutions are not optimal because they do nothing to slow storage growth rates. Publicly-traded companies especially should not rely on these methods as their primary data storage system.

Compliance

Compliance regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley require that companies not only store emails and attachments, but do so in a non-tamperable, secure format. Backup tapes and the like are not secured. IT administrators must also spend hours searching manually to find historical emails requested for audits or other purposes. Publicly-traded companies are under pressure from the government and their stockholders to embrace the hallmark of compliance regulations-accountability. By combining effective policies with efficient technology, however, corporate accountability, risk management, and compliance can actually improve business practices.

What Can Our Archiving Solutions Do?

The primary challenges for manufacturing, design and technology firms are intelligence security, storage management, or compliance-all of which are interconnected. Comprehensive archiving software solutions can actually address all these problems, by combining a secure storage platform with automated live capture and compression of all emails or electronic files.

Manage Critical Intelligence

Offloading emails and attachments to MessageSolution's Enterprise Email Archive decreases the workload on primary servers, which reduces costly system downtime, sluggish functioning, and eliminates the risk of system crashes from overgrown storage volumes. Electronic files can be stored indefinitely in the Enterprise File Archive's tamper-proof, centralized repository. Both archiving solutions function with any storage device, from backup tapes Centera devices, to which you can add multiple repositories for hierarchical storage management.

Reduce Storage Requirements

Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive have multiple storage-saving features. Data entering the archive is compressed at a rate that averages about 75%, one of the highest in the industry. Single instance archiving for emails, files, and attachments ensures that only one copy is archived, even if the same email or attachment is sent to thousands of employees thousands of times, then stored on the file server by every employee. These features significantly slow storage growth on the email and file archives and reduce storage requirements to about a quarter of their original size. Enterprise Email Archive's email and attachment stubbing feature also reduces the load placed on primary email servers in a way that is completely transparent to end-users. Read more about our storage-saving features.

Achieve Compliance

MessageSolution's archiving software solutions'granular access control settings allow the archive administrator to assign or remove users'viewing, search, retrieval and deletion capabilities within the archive. Create and implement access and retention policies for entire locations and departments, or customize down to the individual user level. End-users can easily access their archive through a web-based interface. With Enterprise Email Archive's Suite Edition , employees can access their email archive from their email client, from off line, and even from their BlackBerry mobile device. Human Resources staff, legal counsel or other authorized employees can access theirs and others' archived emails without IT assistance. In case of litigation or compliance calls, locate the required documents in the archive by using the built-in search engine to do a full text key word or key phrase search in multiple fields, including attachments. It's as easy to perform as a Google search and yields results within seconds. Read more about Enterprise Email Archive's compliance support features.

Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive can be installed remotely, eliminating the need for expensive on site assistance. Once installed, the products automate corporate retention policy, giving administrators back valuable time while ensuring compliance. An automated archive allows businesses to implement and monitor their internal and external controls while reducing hours spent manually managing emails and files. Both email and file archives even send administrators feedback if users attempt to violate policy.

Key Benefits of Enterprise Email Archive: