Servo has been chosen by Market Harborough Building Society to help ensure compliance with regulations governing email archiving, while also reducing the burden on storage systems and improving the system for email retrieval.

The society has experienced exponential increases in the volume of customer emails it receives across its six branches and three agencies and two years ago found that its Exchange database was storing 4.5 gigabytes of data. This figure was clearly not sustainable for future growth and scalability. Market Harborough Building Society looked to Servo to help it to store this data more efficiently to future proof the system while ensuring that emails could be archived and retrieved more easily, in compliance with the UK Data Protection Act and Basel II regulations.

Building on seven years’ experience as a provider of email archiving solutions to more than thirty companies in the financial and government sectors, Servo initiated a pre-implementation workshop to help the society develop its archiving and data retention policies and advised Market Harborough Building Society to implement ZANTAZ Enterprise Archiving Solution (EAS). This provided the society with a solution that has simple integration with Outlook and Exchange, offers multiple email policies to the IT Manager, and yet is transparent to end users. Staff did not need any training as they are already comfortable using Microsoft Exchange.

ZANTAZ EAS creates an archive of corporate information, including email messages, files and Microsoft SharePoint. The archive allows large volumes of information to be off-loaded from the building society’s servers, in a controlled and automated fashion; a major benefit which has dramatically improved server performance and extended the lifespan of the server. Storage optimisation enables data to be compressed with “Single Instance Storage” applied across the entire archive, allowing data to be stored efficiently for long-term retention, in compliance with financial industry regulations. Following the deployment of ZANTAZ EAS, the time required to retrieve an email has been reduced from four hours to less than five minutes.

Explaining the benefits of the email archiving system Neil Williams, Assistant General Manager of IT at MHBS said: “We attribute the reduction in used storage capacity to the Single Instance Storage and compression features of ZANTAZ EAS. Even keeping a record of every email, we are not at capacity. Our storage will grow, but we have regained a lot of space and can manage the growth much better now.”

“With ZANTAZ EAS, organisations can retain their email and file records for as long as regulations stipulate and rapidly and reliably search for information if it is required by regulators or for litigation purposes,” says Ian Garland, Storage and Data Management Consultant at Servo. “Market Harborough Building Society has used the solution to take control of information retention, eliminated concerns surrounding deleted information and drastically reduced the amount of storage space taken up in the Exchange database.”