Government of Bermuda Uses Metalogix Archive Manager to Manage Its Microsoft Exchange Environment

OVERVIEW

Located just over 600 miles off the East Coast of the U.S, Bermuda is the oldest self-governing overseas territory in the British Commonwealth. As the country’s largest employer, the Government of Bermuda plays a complex and diverse role in governing the domestic and international affairs of its 64,000+ population and varied constituents.

With its international ties to Britain and its status as a leading offshore financial service center, the Government of Bermuda depends upon reliable, scalable and highly efficient communication technologies to help it manage large volumes of email data entering and exiting the country daily. Compliance is also a key consideration for the Government whose strict risk management policies require that all email must be kept indefinitely and be instantly available on demand – no matter how old. In addition, Government systems must also have continuity of operations safeguards in place to ensure email is available should a hurricane impact the island nation.

THE CHALLENGE

With thousands of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes used for both internal and international government communication, the Government of Bermuda had high standards for its email systems, yet the sheer scale of its Exchange environment made selecting a comprehensive email archiving solution a challenge.

The Government’s primary requirement was for an email backup and disaster recovery plan to support continuity of operations during hurricane season. Second, the ability to store and secure essential email content at another location was also a cornerstone of the Government’s IT contingency plan. Furthermore, managing the Government’s growing email data footprint was proving a challenge as Exchange administrators found themselves tied down with time consuming disk defragmenting tasks.

Finally, the Government also needed a compliance-based email archiving solution that could archive years of email correspondence indefinitely.

These difficulties led the Government of Bermuda on a quest for a highly scalable, compliant email archiving platform to support secure communications on a national and international basis.

THE SOLUTION

After evaluating several options, the Government of Bermuda chose Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange. The email archiving solution was selected for several purposes:

• To provide a backup and disaster recovery solution.
• To offload the Microsoft Exchange environment and reduce disk storage.
• To be completely user transparent.
• To provide a fully compliant solution that safeguards email for years to come.

With its rich feature set, Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange is built on one of the most robust and scalable storage media lifecycle management platforms available today. The ability to instantly restore either single emails or whole mailboxes is one example of how the software effortlessly manages previously tedious and time-consuming administrator tasks – thereby improving resource efficiency.

The secure web-based eDiscovery module also provides auditors and compliance officers with access to a full set of permission-based tools. Searches are carried out in seconds due to the streamlined fast index technology – even over large amounts of data.

THE RESULTS

Enhancing the Microsoft Exchange environment and email management functionality:

• Backup and restore times were reduced dramatically.
• Nothing was installed on the Exchange servers. The archive is completely indexed and offers high speed search.
• Storage space on both source and target has been freed up significantly using Single Instance Storage technology.
• Employees can access email from anywhere.

Extended archiving features:

• The archiving interface is totally transparent to the end users.
• The solution uses active archiving that is both selective and all-inclusive.
• The HSM Lifecycle Storage Manager manages tiered storage and moves data based on age and content from media to media.