Convergence of improved operational processes and compliance
Up until eight years ago, Market Harborough Building Society (MHBS) was a traditional building society that served the community around its main branch in Market Harborough, Leicestershire with mortgages and savings accounts. But in the
late nineties, MHBS broadened its base of customers significantly with the introduction of online mortgage applications and an online customer system. Now employees are as likely to communicate with customers via email as they are to see them in the branch.
With six branches, three agencies and assets of £350 million, MHBS is a small regional building society. Yet exponential growth in email volume in the past six years and major regulations since 2000 have made MHBS think big about compliance and information risk. “We were very concerned with the recovery times of emails, the retention of email and the need to be compliant with a growing number of regulations,” said Neil Williams, Assistant General Manager of IT at MHBS.
In the first four years of all users having email, the size of MHBS’ Exchange database grew to 4.5 gigabytes, with mailboxes accounting for 3.0 gigabytes and public folders for 1.5 gigabytes. To retrieve a deleted email, the IT staff needed to retrieve all users’ mailboxes and disrupt work: it was a labour-intensive, four-hour process.
More importantly, MHBS did not control which emails were retained and which were deleted. “Users treat email informally and often do not keep an email like they would a letter in their box,” said Williams. “We relied on users to put their emails in the right place, and we did not have a clear view of all digital correspondence with customers.”
MHBS’ Compliance Officer was concerned with the UK Data Protection Act, which gives individuals the right to request data that is held about them and to be told how that data is used. As a lender, MHBS must retain data on its customers and cannot purge the data as others do under the Act. Other regulations also concerned the Compliance Officer, including Basel II, the upcoming EU banking regulation that requires banks to minimise operational risk; legal admissibility, which allows digital information to be admissible in court; and, contract laws.
“We knew an email archiving system would help us operationally by reducing retrieval times and the size of the Exchange database,” said Williams. “But it was our Compliance Officer who was really driving the process; he wanted to ensure we were compliant with the wide array of regulations and policies being developed.”
In recognition of the work undertaken by Servo for MHBS, ZANTAZ won the much coveted Complinet 2006 Compliance Award. This accolade was granted for the best technology solution in all sectors of financial services, officially acknowledging the results achieved for MHBS, enabling the building society to achieve compliance and reduce storage with ZANTAZ Enterprise Archiving Solution (EAS).
A flexible and easy to use partner
Neil Williams and his team chose ZANTAZ EAS because of its ease of use, simple integration with Outlook and Exchange and ease of deployment. He also liked the ability to have multiple email policies with EAS. “I liked the flexibility that we didn’t have to have a global email policy—we could actually have a policy per user if we chose,” said Williams.
ZANTAZ EAS, the industry’s leading email archiving solution1, is a suite of software products that enables organisations to create an archive of their corporate information including email messages, files and more recently, Microsoft SharePoint. The archive provides two fundamental benefits. Operationally it allows servers weighed down with large volumes of information to be off-loaded in a controlled and fully automated fashion, dramatically increasing the server performance and stability and extending the lifespan of the server. Storage optimisation also plays a key role with EAS’ SIS: with all data being compressed and Single Instance Storage (SIS) being applied across the entire archive, data is now stored efficiently for long-term retention, where the life cycle engagement or corporate information can be maintained.
In addition, ZANTAZ EAS preserves and protects corporate information assets for compliance with industry information regulations and ensures the business is ready for potential litigation. With EAS, organisations can retain their email and file records for as long as regulations stipulate and can rapidly and reliably search for information
required for regulators and/or litigators.
As well as being a Microsoft Gold Infrastructure Partner, specialising in Exchange and Data Retention solutions, Servo is an accredited ZANTAZ Platinum Partner and has been implementing email archiving solutions since 1999. Servo has successfully implemented ZANTAZ EAS for over 30 of its established customers, ranging from the Finance Sector, to Government and Construction Sectors. Servo was therefore well equipped to tackle the operational and compliance challenges faced by MHBS.
Implementation and results
Whilst implementing ZANTAZ EAS at MHBS, Servo worked proactively with the customer to develop email archiving and data retention policies through a pre-implementation design workshop.
During implementation of ZANTAZ EAS, users did not need training to use the software since they were already comfortable with Microsoft Exchange; the EAS system is transparent to the end user.
But for the IT department and compliance officer, the difference is measurable. The IT department has taken control of information retention and eliminated concerns of deleted information. “We now believe we are compliant with current regulations and are ready to deal with future requirements,” said Williams.
Even with an all-encompassing email archiving policy, in which one copy of every email is archived, MHBS has drastically reduced storage size in the Exchange database, and for nearly two years—combined with the EAS archive server—the database was at a lower storage capacity than prior to archiving. Before ZANTAZ EAS was installed, mailboxes and public folders accounted for 4.5 gigabytes of space on the Exchange database — despite two more years of email, that size has only in the past year surpassed the original size of Exchange.
“We attribute the reduction in used storage capacity to the single-instance storage and compression features of ZANTAZ EAS,” said Williams. “Even keeping a record of every email, we are not at capacity in the Exchange database or EAS archive server. Our storage will grow, but we have a lot of space back and can manage the growth much better now.”
Williams’ concerns about email retrieval have also been alleviated. The time to retrieve a deleted email has been reduced from four hours to less than five minutes, and the process is not invasive to users at all. He sums up the impact of the email archiving system: “At the end of the day, we are a small player, but we are set apart by having a fully implemented email archiving system that improves our operational processes and ensures compliance. I do feel that any organisation that uses email needs a solution like this.”
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1 IDC’s “Worldwide Email Archiving Applications 2005-2009 Forecast and 2004 Vendor Shares”.