Logicalis - Internal Email Management
Logicalis developed a total solution for its own Email Archiving problem and solved its customers' email problems in the process. Logicalis has the advantage of being a lot like its customers: it is a successful business that grows by outperforming the expectations of its clients. Like its clients, Logicalis depends on email as its most basic form of communication, internally as well as externally. And, like its clients, Logicalis' email had swollen over the years into a tsunami of odd-shaped documents, old PowerPoint files, video clips, sentimental messages from home, 100,000 messages about where to have lunch, a few lost nuggets of absolutely mission critical data and a whole lot of miscellaneous patter that has risen up like a gathering storm on the back step of Logicalis and virtually every other successful business in America today.
U.S. corporations have been made to look into this looming maelstrom because of an assortment of federal requirements including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SEC and NASD. Many who have stood eyeball-to-eyeball with their own personal email dilemma have come away shaken from the experience. Logicalis Vice President National Infrastructure Consulting Eric Linxweiler looked deeply into the email archiving challenge at Logicalis and came away with another opportunity for Logicalis to outperform the expectations of its clients: An email archiving solution that not only subdues the email nemesis but also goes a long way toward accomplishing the broader goal of comprehensive content management throughout the corporation.
Rollout
Linxweiler rolled out the email archive solution within Logicalis and it was frankly a daunting task. Logicalis has more than 450 employees who together receive an average of about 1.2 million emails every month. Outlook PST files–some of them more than seven years old–were propagating everywhere. Half the calls to the help desk were coming from employees struggling to cope with their email files on their own machines. Local hard drives had become like so many personal attics, jam-packed with emails that got saved instead of thrown out–the significant tossed in with the irrelevant. There was no way to back all this stuff up, and retrieving a specific email was becoming an exercise in futility...if not liability.
As with most problems, the first step in solving this one was facing it head on, and facing complex problems is literally what Linxweiler does for a living. His job at Logicalis is to design, develop and deploy complex solutions for major clients. Linxweiler also had the advantage of being able to use Logicalis' Managed Services facility as a development and deployment platform for an email archiving solution.
Good news
The good news about the uniquely complex email archiving problem is that there is a good solution that can be tailored to every corporation. It's a three-tiered architecture: one tier for messaging, one tier for email archiving and one for archive storage.
The total solution that Linxweiler developed involved products from several vendors including EMC, Microsoft (Exchange), HP, IBM, and Veritas. It also involved high-level policy decisions, extensive planning, and the recognition that email users corporation-wide were being asked to make a fundamental change in how they use email. Linxweiler, for one, had saved every email he'd received in the last eight years. He had to let go of that. He had to accept that email is not actually his personal property, but the property of the corporation.
It wasn't easy, but by March 28, 2006 it was done. The tsunami of undifferentiated email was calmed. When the migration was complete, message storage size was reduced by 80 percent. All email was standardized on Microsoft Exchange, and the PST suffix was retired. The Content Address Storage capability of Centera from EMC transformed retrieving important messages from a lost art to a predictable science. Not only does the Logicalis email Archiving solution meet all compliance requirements, but it also converts email communications from an operational and legal liability to a managed resource–from an attic to an asset.
Operational upside
"People look at email archiving and think it's only for risk and compliance," Linxweiler notes, "but there's a huge operational upside that almost justifies the project by itself. You decrease the amount of time and effort to manage your email, you decrease the amount of storage required, and you make future migration and upgrades easier."
No technical solution is complete without support, and for that Linxweiler worked with Logicalis' own Managed Services team to develop the procedures and trained staff necessary to keep email archiving running smoothly both for Logicalis and for Logicalis' customers.
Every public company must comply with email archiving requirements, but not every public company has the in-house technical support to manage and support email archiving.
"We already outsourced a lot of our customers' Exchange environments," Linxweiler notes, "now we're managing their complete messaging environment, including the archives."
Logicalis Business Manager for Managed Services Kevin Clark says support for email archiving is a logical extension of Managed Service's operational skill set. The hands-on experience his team has gained supporting email archiving internally for Logicalis, he adds, gives Managed Services a level of expertise that companies implementing email archiving for the first time simply do not have.
"There is no substitute for experience," Clark says. He notes that Managed Services has the additional advantage of having worked closely with EMC to develop a full suite of support offerings that can be tailored to fit the exact needs of Managed Services clients.
EMC Boot Camp
Logicalis' close working relationship with EMC is only one of the reasons that it is now the fastest growing EMC National Partner with more than 220 percent year-over-year growth. Other reasons include the 26 technical staff who were trained at various EMC Boot Camps in Boston, the fact that 90 percent of the Logicalis sales staff have been trained on email archiving, and the fact that Logicalis' national coverage means that there is no place in North America that isn't local for Logicalis.
The enthusiasm for the email archiving solution among the Logicalis sales staff is a testament to the thoroughness of Linxweiler's planning for the rollout at Logicalis. They are also more knowledgeable about what it entails because they have just been through it themselves.
From the experience with solving its own email archiving challenge, Logicalis has developed two approaches to solving its customers' email challenges: customers can choose to have Logicalis work with them to develop a solution in-house, or they can outsource email archiving to Logicalis Managed Services. Either way, Logicalis can guarantee its email archiving solutions will work for its customers because they designed them, deployed them use them, and support them 24/7 at Logicalis.
