Discovery and Recovery Problems

For most organizations, e-mail is the single most important repository of business records and other content that users need on a daily basis. E-mail is now the de facto communications medium for most users and is the primary file transport mechanism for content of all types.

In order to perform discovery and recovery tasks, Exchange administrative teams have typically provided message-level recovery services through time-consuming brick-level backups, or by maintaining costly and complex Exchange recovery infrastructures. These tasks can take hours, days or even weeks to complete, depending on objective and scale of the project.

Situations Driving Message-level Recovery & Discovery

Restoration of complete Exchange Information Stores (Database) can be accomplished quite effectively using real time backup solutions such as Lucid8's DigiVault®. However, the real challenge is to accomplish granular message-level restoration without increasing backup times and storage cost.

 Easy - An end user deletes an item or multiple items by accident, or needs to retrieve information that was deleted some time ago. If you can recover the items using the "Recover Deleted Items" feature the process is simple. BUT If the feature was not enabled or if the time limit has expired it's suddenly not so simple.

 Not so easy - An end user or administrator accidentally deletes a public folder that contains e-mails, processes, contacts and other documentation. The bad news is that native tools such as Exmerge do not handle public folders. What are you going to do?

 Difficult - HR is investigating allegations made by one employee against another and the need all e-mails to, from and about the employees. In order to achieve full legal coverage you will need to search the live server as well as all information that exist in any retained backups. How do you quickly and effectively find all this information and do it without alerting the accused party?

 Complicated - An audit or legal inquiry that could involve multiple employees and their e-mail over a long period of time. You're looking for subject matter, attachments and more so this could spread across multiple mailboxes, servers and information stores. Deadlines, penalties, cost and internal as well as external customer confidence are at risk here. How do you tackle this enormous undertaking in a timely manner?

 Overwhelming - A regulatory investigation involves government or industry agencies, complete with tight deadlines and stiff penalties for non-compliance. The growing importance of e-mail has not been lost on the courts and government regulators. As a result, the ability to extract content from message stores quickly and efficiently is becoming much more important. Stand and deliver or face the consequences.

For today's messaging administrator, the challenge is clearer than ever; if a mailbox or e-mail item is deleted, corrupted or required for legal, regulatory or other needs they must have the ability to quickly and efficiently discover and recover information within a production server or from historical backups of that server and then restore or extract the information to the appropriate place and format in order to meet the objective.

There is a solution.