Productivity but expensive

Email boosts productivity. Email is expensive to support. How many times have we heard that?

But one consulting firm, Procedo, Inc., exists to maximize the former while minimizing the latter. Since 2003, Procedo has been helping a major North American financial institution save what by 2008 will add up to $26 million in email-related costs using Symantec Enterprise Vault.

Discovery, the long, arduous, and costly journey

There were a number of factors that weighed in the decision of the financial services client turning to Procedo and Symantec Enterprise Vault. The most pressing requirement was the need to produce records and information for regulatory compliance and litigation. Discovery was often a very costly endeavor. For example, a 2002 discovery request involved recovering some 300 backup tapes, but since the company actually recovered only a fraction of the tapes and produced incomplete email messaging data, it received a $1 million fine.

At the same time, these discovery requests had a huge impact on staff productivity. The legal team, from paralegal staff to litigation attorneys, was having difficulty retrieving information involved in litigation from the archive. In one case they needed to recover 14 days worth of backup tapes to find 10 user mailboxes, which meant searching through 400 backup tapes—an effort that required three full time employees and took approximately five months to complete!

6,500 becomes 95,000

The initial deployment took place in 2003 and was rolled out to 6,500 users. The solution included Enterprise Vault options such as Compliance Accelerator, Discovery Accelerator, Microsoft Exchange Journaling, and PST Migrator. In 2005, when the financial services company was preparing to migrate operations with a sister organization, it embarked on a larger-scale deployment, eventually targeted at all 95,000 employees.

The benefits the client is realizing are numerous. Using its Total Operational Economic Impact (TOEI) model, The Alchemy Solutions Group pinpointed six basic areas of business value:

• Archive search capabilities
• Regulatory fine cost avoidance
• IT productivity in email recovery
• Tape storage cost avoidance
• Email storage compression savings
• Server and IT labor cost avoidance

The transformation: From tape to disk

All of this adds up to big savings. The heavily-regulated brokerage division at this customer needs complete archives of its 20 terabyte email database for e-discovery and compliance. Projects show the company would be spending $6.1 million between 2003 and 2008 to make, store, and handle weekly tape backups. With the help of Procedo and Enterprise Vault, these costs are being avoided.

It is not fine

In addition, Enterprise Vault’s streamlined search capability is helping the company avert an estimated $8 million in e-discovery fines and save $6 million more in labor costs. Fulfillment of discovery requests previously took 80 hours; it now takes a fraction of an hour.

Piling the results on

Because Enterprise Vault stores email more efficiently, there is an additional $3 million in reduced server and IT labor costs, $1 million from data compression savings, and $1 million in other IT productivity improvements. These savings will total $26 million by 2008 according to the business value analysis study by The Alchemy Solutions Group.

Related Information

• Business Value Analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group
• Procedo web site