Archiving Government Email to the Cloud
May 22, 2013
By Angela Williams

Many organizations have compliance and operational requirements associated with saving email and social media. Benton County, in the state of Washington, is such an organization. Benton County used Novell GroupWise as their email system, and needed a message archiving solution that complied with the State of Washington's Public Records Act, or sunshine law. The solution they needed had to support various data management features and to help mitigate litigation risks.

In response to routine audits for compliance of regulations around open meetings, Benton County began archiving their GroupWise email in 2006. They initially used an on-premise email archiving solution to archive 720 mailboxes. As the number of accounts and volume of email archived increased, they began to struggle with scalability and completing word and phrase searches successfully. In 2011 a series of public records requests for email resulted in incomplete and failed searches. Due to performance and compliance issues, Benton County began looking into an alternative archiving solution. The primary driver behind a new archiving solution stemmed from potential liability due to non-compliance of the Public Records Act. A secondary motive was to reduce the strain of data growth on the county's storage infrastructure.

In searching for a new archiving solution, Benton County came up with two main business requirements, which are simplified as: 1) search and retrieval performance, and 2) support for a Cloud-based solution.

After evaluating three cloud-service vendors, Benton County chose Smarsh Email Management Suite for their eDiscovery/archiving solution based on the following: 1) Smarsh's SaaS offering had a proven track record in messaging archiving with a significant base of government customers of varying sizes, location of datacenters, 2) support for archiving other electronic records such as text messages, smart phones, and social media 3) and of course, support for GroupWise.

Nexic Journaling is the glue to connect Smarsh with GroupWise, and made it possible for Benton County to archive their GroupWise email to Smarsh. Journaling‘s design enables high performance and scalability, delivering the most flexible archiving opportunities for GroupWise customers, enabling them to get the lowest total cost of ownership for archiving their email. Journaling sends email from GroupWise in standard-based formats to Cloud-based archiving solutions, such as Smarsh Email Management Suite. This capability is used to archive messages to solutions developed specifically for Microsoft Exchange, but that do not natively support GroupWise. Journaling sends a copy of the GroupWise message, with its associated attachments, to the external solution using SSL/TLS encryption for data security. When using Journaling's Microsoft Exchange compatibility mode, most supported archiving solutions will not know the message originated from GroupWise. In addition to archiving live GroupWise internal and/or external email, Journaling can send historical or personal archive email as well.

Nexic, Inc. is a leader in email archiving for GroupWise customers, with strategic relationships with Novell and Smarsh among many others. Millions of users in over 30 countries use Nexic products. To find out more information about Nexic or to find information on various industry leading archive solutions, visit www.nexic.com.