Opality Mail Vault enhances Opality Mail where compliance and discovery are issues

Background

  • Organisations need to satisfy their regulatory compliance responsibilities, and avoid potential business crippling fines.
  • Brokers and dealers need to comply with SEC Rule 17a-4.
  • US companies need to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) and the USA Patriot Act (2001).
  • In fact, these apply to European companies with US parents or subsidiaries.

The UK Data Protection Act of 1998 requires that personal data be held in a secure fashion with restricted access. The act means that anyone can demand information held on them to be disclosed within 20 days. The most common type of request is from employees in sex discrimination actions or ex-employees in wrongful dismissal cases. The UK’s FSA requires regulated institutions to retain client records for a number of years. The Freedom of Information Act of 2000 can compel any UK public body to disclose almost any type of information.

Often, the information subject to discovery is contained in emails. To search for emails older than a few months, ordinarily requires a mail server administrator to manually restore the server from a tape backup and then search through mailboxes manually. This can take quite a while and could be very costly. It is far easier if emails are automatically stored in a relational database so they can be located with a simple search query.

Supervising all email exchanges can be a complicated task for many in house IT staff. To address this, Microsoft added a Journaling feature to Exchange which keeps a duplicate copy of emails. The problem with journaling is that it bloats the Exchange server. This in turn slows it down and makes it less reliable. The alternative is to fully archive the Journal mailboxes on a daily basis to a non-Exchange, relational, searchable, secure data store. To increase resilience, that data store should be in a different location to the Exchange server.

Opality Email Vault is a hosted archive of your in-house Exchange Journal mailboxes. Archived messages in the Vault can be accessed only by authorized personnel, via a secure web interface.

Features and Benefits

Permanent archive – all incoming and outgoing emails and attachments are stored in multiple secure data stores around London.

Transparent to end users – users are unaware any change.

Accessible only by authorized personnel – Only those people with the necessary credentials can access the archived emails via a secure web service which has full search functionality.

Hosted off site – Should your mail server or premises become unavailable, your organisation will not lose its email records as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need to install any software?

No.

Q: Will Journaling affect the performance of my Exchange Server?

Not if items are archived using our service. After archiving, Journal entries are deleted.

Q: Do Opality staff have access to my organization’s messages?

Normally no, and only if you grant them the necessary rights.

Q: What does it cost?

Per vault (whole domain or part of a domain), £50 per month plus £2 per Gb of vault storage