The Fortiva Blog

To Stub or Not to Stub (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In the world of email archiving, there is an ongoing argument about the value of stubbing, a process designed to help manage the storage in Exchange by replacing messages or attachments on an email server with a link to a copy of the file in an archive. I thought I’d weigh in on this topic, first by explaining the concept and looking at the pros and cons, and then (in a second post), providing a list of four best practices that businesses should follow if they’re relying on stubbing in their organization.

With the growth of email volume outpacing the reduction in total cost of storage ownership, it comes as no surprise that IT is struggling to manage Exchange storage. The real frustration for most Exchange administrators is that the vast majority of their storage is occupied with content that people almost never read. For performance and reliability reasons, Exchange is usually implemented on the most expensive of storage platforms making this usage pattern extremely expensive. Furthermore, as a transaction system, every piece of data is open for modification. This means that every piece of data needs to be backed up on a regular basis.

Introducing Stubbing – How it works
All of these factors have led IT to investigate archiving as a means to address their storage challenges. The idea is simple – focus the Exchange server on the delivery and management of current mail, and push the older mail to another repository that can be managed on less expensive infrastructure. That repository can then use archival storage management processes that allow for incremental backup of only newly added information, rather than the entire set.

Moving the data to another location (the archive) benefits IT; however, training users to change their behavior and look for this information in a new application (often with unique user interfaces and workflows) is often too cumbersome for broad adoption. To address these concerns, archiving vendors introduced features known as stubbing or shortcutting. This involves replacing the messages or attachments in users’ mailboxes with a pointer to the copy in the archive. From an end-user’s perspective, the email data is still accessible from Outlook, and yet they don’t run into their mailbox quota less often.

Stubbing Drawbacks
Stubbing isn’t without its drawbacks, however. To understand the impact on storage, you need a solid understanding of Exchange’s single instance storage model. When a message is delivered to multiple recipients within the same mailbox database (storage group), the message body and attachments are only stored once, and the message entry in each mailbox simply references the single copy of this data.

When a user modifies a message in their mailbox, Exchange creates a unique copy of the content and points the message in the user’s mailbox to that copy. As Exchange doesn’t provide any way to access the single-instance store of content, stubbing processes behave like end-user edits -- modifying messages on a mailbox by mailbox basis. If a message was sent to multiple recipients on the same mailbox database, but you only stub content for some of them, you actually increase not decrease storage by implementing stubbing. Furthermore, even though stubs may be small (typically <2K), as the stubbing process works through each mailbox, it is creating separate items in the single-instance store.

Since many elements of Exchange and data management processes are impacted by the number of entries in the tables, not just their total size, the unwinding of single-instance storage in Exchange can be problematic. As it happens, however, Microsoft Office has a habit of updating attachment metadata when a user views the item, which in most environments means that single-instance storage is pretty much non-existent within Exchange. The more of these changes that are made in Exchange between backups, the longer an incremental backup of the mail system will take.

Microsoft’s answer to the storage management problem is to change Exchange 2007 to support dramatically larger mailboxes and to change the way backup processes work so that managing these larger mailboxes databases becomes more practical. While most firms that I’ve talked to plan to increase mailbox sizes with their conversion to Exchange 2007, few are creating the 1GB mailboxes that Microsoft touts.

Conclusion
Clearly, stubbing is not the straightforward Exchange storage management solution that some vendors would have you believe. That having been said, when implemented properly, it can be a valuable tool to manage the growth of Exchange storage with minimal impact on end-user behavior. In my next post, I’ll talk about four best practices to make the most of stubbing in your organization.

FRCP Case Law Review: Is Your Company Really Prepared? (Part 2 of 3)

Posted by Fortiva Blog Editor

In my previous post, I reviewed a couple of FRCP related cases that clearly illustrated the notion that under the FRCP, deadlines must be met and cost is not a valid excuse.  Here are some more interesting e-discovery case summaries where the stipulations of the FRCP were upheld. These law suits could have easily been avoided had the defendants been proactive and implemented effective solutions that would allow them to perform searches and retrieve relevant electronic records in a timely manner.

Need to be Prepared to Produce any Emails, Regardless of Format
Peacock v. Merrill (Jan. 17, 2008). In this litigation, the defendants sought production of electronic tax information, and the plaintiff claimed the motion was moot, arguing she had already fully produced responsive documents. The defendants sought an exact replica of a floppy disk to determine if the plaintiff fully complied with the discovery request. Relying on FRCP 34(b)(i)-(iii), the court ordered production of disk files in native electronic format to ensure access to all metadata, determining that the date stamps of many of the documents were relevant.

Mere Assertion of Burden Insufficient to Relieve Production Duties
City of Seattle v. Prof’l Basketball Club (Feb. 25, 2008). In this dispute over performance of a lease agreement, the plaintiff filed a motion to compel the defendant to search and produce responsive e-mails from six of its eight members. Having produced 150,000 e-mails from two of the members, the defendant objected to this request, claiming the search would “increase the universe exponentially” and would generally produce irrelevant documents. Finding a principal-agent relationship between the defendant and its members, the court determined sufficient cause to demand the documents from its members as the defendant was in possession, custody or control of the e-mails at issue. The court, therefore, ordered the defendant to produce e-mail from the remaining four members at issue, finding the defendant’s claim of burden to be insufficient under Fed.R.Civ.Pro. 26(b)(2)(B).

Simon Prop. Group, Inc. v. Taubman Ctr., Inc., (Jan. 24, 2008). In this suit involving securities and tort claims, the defendant contested the enforcement of third-party subpoenas. The defendant argued that compliance with the subpoenas would be unduly burdensome and expensive since the search terms provided by the plaintiffs resulted in the identification of over 250,000 files. The defendant claimed it would take three full-time employees four weeks to determine the responsiveness of those documents. The plaintiffs offered to narrow the scope of the search by time period, search terms and perhaps even limit the number of servers to be searched. The court granted the plaintiffs’ motion to enforce the subpoenas, holding the requests were not unduly burdensome as discovery of electronic files are common place in business litigation.

Read more on the FRCP Case Law Review series - Part 1 - Part 2 -

SLAs a must for SaaS providers

Posted by Chris Moores, Professional Services

Salesforce has often been cited as the pioneer for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry. We use Salesforce ourselves, and have been quite happy with this decision. However, I recently requested a copy of their Service Level Agreement (SLA) for service availability and was taken aback with the reaction I got from their customer support department. The responses I got ranged from “What’s an SLA?” to “Do you mean you want to know our support ticket resolution time?” to “In the 5 years I have been working here, I’ve never had anyone ask that question.”

It doesn’t seem like Salesforce has any SLAs, which I find very odd. This prompted me to run some online searches, and the results surprised me a bit – I didn’t realize that SLAs are far from prevalent among SaaS providers. I think this could be one reason why some IT departments are still quite skeptical about using SaaS applications.

As Craig had pointed out in a previous post, we constantly hear from customers that one of the things they love about outsourcing is that they no longer have to stress about uptime and performance. At Fortiva/Proofpoint, we not only take over the stress of managing all infrastructure and archiving application issues that may arise, we also strive for unsurpassed customer service and industry leading SLAs that few providers (both outsourced or on-premise) can match.

FRCP Case Law Review: What do the Courts Expect? (Part 1 of 3)

Posted by Fortiva Blog Editor

Since the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were amended in December, 2006, much has been published on this topic.  Numerous studies and papers tackled topics from how companies were responding, to whether or not they were prepared, and even whether or not they understood the amendments and their implications. 

While all these surveys, studies, articles and discussions were taking place, real cases, with real organizations were being tried in real courts – with real consequences.  Over the last year and a half, a multitude of court opinions on electronic discovery have been issued. While these rulings vary in their impact, they all point to the fact that the FRCP is an undeniable reality for organizations right now.  All organizations, and IT departments in particular, should be aware of what’s really expected by the courts and must be prepared to comply with the FRCP.

This blog series will review the most notable recent e-discovery cases, illustrating how the courts interpret and uphold the FRCP requirements, and the consequences they dole out for non-compliance.

Deadlines must be met; Cost is not a valid Excuse
Best Buy v. Developers Diversified Realty (February 1, 2007) - Ordered to produce information within 28 days, regardless of cost. In this case, the defendants (Diversified) argued that the emails and other electronic documents that were requested by Best Buy were not “reasonably accessible” (they existed only on archived, electronic backup tapes). Diversified cited a cost of $125,000 to recover the information. The judge did not accept the argument and ordered that the information be produced within 28 days, including IT time and legal preparation.

Williams v. Taser International (June 4, 2007) - Ordered to conduct specific searches and produce results in 30 days, regardless of cost. In this case, neither party could agree on what data should be produced for discovery. In an effort to move the case forward, the judge ruled that the defendant, Taser, must run twenty-one (21) specific searches to identify a collection of "presumptively responsive documents." Taser had thirty (30) days from entry of the Order to produce all such documents in a “searchable, electronic form”.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Stay tuned for more case reviews in my upcoming blogs.

Read more on the FRCP Case Law Review series - Part 1 - Part 2 -

Preparing for FRCP - Collection Retrieval (Part 5 of 5)

Posted by Alan Armstrong, VP Business Development

My final article in the FRCP readiness series is about Collection, Search, and Retrieval – the most expensive, tedious, and time-consuming element of the legal discovery process. To paint some context, allow me to start with a story about Dave, an Assistant General Counsel at a Fortune 500 company.

Recently I was in a meeting with 20 people, including Dave, where this company was evaluating  Fortiva against an in-house competitor. Fortiva was the underdog, as this in-house competitor is considered the leader in the space for companies who want to go through the hassle of managing their own email archive.

Dave was attending the meeting mostly out of obligation to review all the vendors being considered, but his underlying goal was to find a way to do better “Early Case Assessment”, to reduce the cost of collection and processing, and to just know, going in to a “meet and confer” meeting, what data can be discovered, and at what cost.

Until this moment in the meeting, Dave was fairly nonplussed with our discussion. His eyes were not glossing over exactly, but he definitely had not been enthused. We were in the middle of a product demonstration, when our SE began to show the Fortiva search capability. All of a sudden, there was a rustling of papers at Dave’s end of the room. Remember, there were 20 other people in this room, so I didn’t have eye contact with everyone. After a bit of mumbling back and forth, the project sponsor, Andy, interrupted: “I just want everyone to know what’s going on here … when Fortiva shows you this search capability, they are executing a search against their production database, not a demo system.”

It seems that Dave was flummoxed by the response time of the search.

This is not surprising:  in many cases, it can take days (or even weeks) for Legal to retrieve the results of a search request, and the request must be executed by IT. As a result, Dave was shocked and stopped the meeting to clarify what had just happened. For him, real-time search in the hands of Legal rather than just IT was a game changer.

Let’s just say Fortiva won that account over the in-house competitor who could not offer a search performance guarantee. (We challenge our competitors to offer an SLA around search).

Dave’s reaction reveals a lot about the difficulties that Legal has in meeting its objectives. Knowing what kind of data the company has and being able to search and retrieve it can be very costly and time consuming.  And because a “meet and confer” must occur within 99 days of filing, counsel must know what data exists, where it exists and the cost and timeframe of retrieval.  Dave and others in his situation have told me that it is quite common for legal to be unsure about what it can deliver and at what cost.  This can result in over-promising and under-delivering, not to mention the possibility for fines and “negative inferences”. The search technology we showed him was exciting precisely because it would enable Dave to know what he has and make a more informed decision sooner.

Bottom line, here is some advice to prepare for e-Discovery:

1. Ensure you can identify sources of data and be prepared to  start to collect, search and review relevant email data when notice of suit first received
2. Invest in real-time search technology
3. Ensure data is easily searchable to perform early case assessment

Hope this helps.

Alan

Read more on the Preparing for FRCP series - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

SaaS vs. On-Premise Email Archiving (2 of 2)

By Fortiva Blog Editor

Earlier, we mentioned that for several reasons email archiving is best managed by a SaaS specialist rather than on-premise. Here is a more in-depth look at the time, effort, and costs involved with each deployment method so that you will get a better understanding of why SaaS is the better choice for an email archive.

Planning
Before implementing an on-premise archive, IT has to conduct some upfront planning that includes identifying the required infrastructure, designing the implementation, projecting growth requirements, and determining the upfront capital costs involved. Adequate planning will run between 3 to 6 months on average. On the other hand, SaaS implementations such as Fortiva require a limited amount of planning on the customer’s part and can be done in 1 to 14 days depending on the size of the customer and number of locations involved.

Implementation
For an on-premise solution, getting up and running means purchasing the required hardware, installing the archiving software, integrating it with existing systems, and testing it to make sure that the solution does not create problems with other applications. If you want to maintain a redundant copy of the archive as a risk-reduction feature, you will have to repeat this process in a secondary data-center and adjust your budgets accordingly. On average, this entire process can take 2 to 4 months for an on-premise solution. For a SaaS solution, getting up and running just means plugging in the application and adding in the user names which can be done in a day. Total implementation time for a SaaS solution is typically 1 to 5 days.

Maintenance & Management of Data
There are several tasks that must be done on an on-going basis in order to maintain an email archive. Generally the tasks include data disposition to ensure that emails that have exceeded the retention term are deleted from the archive; backing-up the archive on a regular basis to make sure archived data is properly preserved and recoverable when required (this can be a challenge as the archive grows over time); monitoring the archive to identify problems; and troubleshooting hardware failures, outages, and other issues as they come up. For an on-premise solution, this will require a great deal of IT time and may require additional resources. However, with a SaaS solution, all these management and maintenance related tasks are taken care of by the solution provider thus allowing the customer organization’s IT team to focus on their other priorities. Additionally, SaaS solutions such as Fortiva provide customers with 24x7 monitoring and issue resolution, which is rarely the case with an on-premise archiving solution.

Performance & Upgrades
The nature of archiving is such that you will eventually run out of storage. This makes it necessary to perform ongoing capacity planning to ensure storage requirements are met as the archive grows. For an on-premise solution, this will require the purchase of additional servers and data center space as necessary. Additionally, it is important to note that technology is constantly being improved and hardware options for data storage will inevitably undergo significant changes within 3 to 5 years.  This makes the likelihood of moving archived data to newer storage technologies very high and will require a high level of expertise on behalf of your IT team. Finally, if the hardware is not upgraded as necessary, it will be difficult for on-premise solutions to search and export data in the case of discovery requests.  With a SaaS solution, the solution provider takes care of the ongoing capacity planning and has the expertise to perform complex and time-consuming tasks such as migrating data to new technologies. SaaS companies, such as Fortiva, are big on R&D and are constantly looking for ways to make the archive better and they ensure that product upgrades are automatically applied without additional costs to the customer. In addition, SaaS solutions leverage the shared infrastructure of a multi-tenant SaaS architecture to provide access to hundreds of servers on-demand ensuring enterprise-grade search performance. In fact, Fortiva is the only company in the industry who backs up their search performance with a guarantee.

Basically, the implementation of an on-premise email archive is a significant commitment and undertaking for IT which only grows as the archive increases in size. Considering the management time, effort, and costs involved with an email archive, the decision to go with a SaaS solution should be an easy one.

Proofpoint Acquires Fortiva

By Fortiva Blog Editor

Exciting times are in the horizon as it was announced today that Fortiva has been acquired by Proofpoint, a leading provider of SaaS solutions for email security, data loss prevention and email management. Proofpoint will now be offering Proofpoint Email Archiving as a complementary product to its email security platform. As stated by Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint, Inc., “Fortiva’s email archiving solution is the most advanced, secure, easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution in the market today and we’re excited to have Fortiva’s team and technology as part of Proofpoint. Fortiva’s on-demand solution is a natural extension to Proofpoint’s email security platform, so nearly all of our customers can deploy and benefit from Fortiva immediately.”

What does this mean to Fortiva's customers, partners, and friends? All this means is that customers will benefit from increased R&D investment in Fortiva products, enhanced integration of Proofpoint's complementary solutions, and access to Proofpoint's golbal support and services. Partners will also benefit from Proofpoint's world-class partner program which provides a broader portfolio of solutions.

Read the full press release to find out more about this exciting change.

SaaS vs Software for Vendors – Lesson #3: The Real Potential Lies in Business Model Innovation

Posted by Paul Chen, President, Managed Services

I ended my last post by discussing how at Fortiva, understanding our cost to serve helped us to improve our product and even introduce a new product offering. This leads me to my third and final lesson on the difference between SaaS and traditional software – business model flexibility.

The business model for traditional software is typically fairly straightforward – you create and develop it, produce it (on some type of media), and sell it to the customer either directly, or through a channel. From there, you typically have very little communication with the customer, with the possible exception of customer service.

SaaS businesses, on the other hand, have far more flexibility to adopt different business models, even taking advantage of more than one business model at the same time. This flexibility provides significantly more opportunities than traditional software to continually innovate and find new ways to leverage a product in different ways to improve revenues.

Let me give you an example. Google’s founders started out with a business model based on licensing their search technology to key portal vendors, such as Yahoo. Little did they know that just a few years later, they would introduce a keyword advertising program that would ultimately form the basis of Google AdWords, which today makes up the majority of their revenue. If they had stopped with the licensing business model, Google as we know it would not exist today.

Here’s another example – this time, a hypothetical one. At Fortiva, we charge a per-user licensing fee as well as a fee for blocks of storage to access our email archiving solution – essentially a pay-for-use model. But what if we decided to offer email archiving for free? It may sound crazy, but it could be a valid business model. Consider this – a large portion of businesses archive their email to meet requirements in the case of future litigation, and those businesses often have little need to access archived data before that time. Hypothetically, we could simply charge those customers to search and access their archives when litigation arises. This would give us the chance to target companies that don’t feel they can justify the cost of a pro-active approach to legal risk (by implementing an archive), while still benefiting in the long run from the inevitable.

I’m not suggesting that this is something we’re going to do, but it gives you an idea of the type of innovative thinking that can open up new business opportunities in the SaaS world.

At the end of the day, business model innovation can be a key competitive advantage for any company. SaaS opens the door to far greater flexibility in this area, and businesses embarking on this delivery model should not lose sight of that.

Read more on the SaaS vs Software: Lessons Learned series
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

SaaS delivers SLA-backed solutions; Software delivers... just software

Posted by Craig Rennick, Founder and VP Sales

As a service provider of email archiving to enterprise customers, we pay great attention to customer service.  To this end, we talk to our customers frequently and schedule face-to-face senior level meetings to review our scorecard and get direct input on customer satisfaction. 

During our most recent road trip where I met some of our key customers, one of our customers summed it up perfectly when he said, “This is why we outsource to Fortiva, we want you stressing about this stuff – not us!”   Clearly we are upheld to scrutiny and standards that are beyond any one company’s capabilities to deliver in-house – and we expect that – I mean after all, why else outsource?   

In many of the calls I’ve been on, I continually hear about failed installations of on-premise software, like Enterprise Vault. What’s worse is that, I hear about them from prospects who have already invested time and money on software, built up a large archive, and are now having challenges keeping it running. And because change is difficult, IT administrators and users lower their expectations, apply band-aids and live with their situation. 

Then I think about Fortiva's customers and how they don’t need to tolerate unacceptable performance. They don’t need to accept less than desirable application effectiveness.  They also always have a provider working 7/24 to make things right and achieve industry leading SLA’s.  For example, Fortiva is the only provider in the email archiving industry that offers an SLA around search response time. To date, I have yet to come across an in-house IT department that would commit to any SLA’s for their own email archive.

No wonder we constantly hear extremely positive feedback from our customers.  Coming back from that week of customer visits, it reinforced why SaaS really is the wave of the future.  As a 15 year veteran VP Sales who now prescribes to SaaS for sales automation, I can see why IT will move in the same direction.

Preparing for FRCP - Litigation hold (Part 4 of 5)

Posted by Alan Armstrong, VP Business Development

“Stop recycling the tapes!” Our prospects often described this as their approach to litigation holds before implementing Fortiva.

FRCP now requires that companies place a litigation hold on data immediately upon hearing of a potential lawsuit. This means that companies cannot wait even until the lawsuit is officially filed; they must place the hold upon suspicion of an impending lawsuit.

A Litigation Hold suspends disposition of information pending the outcome of a related lawsuit. The typical approach has several problems, but the primary problem is the lack of precision; when you place a hold on a set of tapes, you are retaining all of the information on those tapes, which will certainly be more information than you are required to retain.

And with more information comes a greater cost of processing and filtering, but worst of all it increases the risk of retaining information beyond its desired retention policy.

The other problem with the typical approach to litigation holds is that they often rely on end users to refrain from deleting information. After legal makes the “backup tape retention order”, the next step is often to instruct users to stop deleting any relevant information.

Does this sound dangerous? Consider:

• When legal asks an end-user to stop deleting information related to a legal case, they are frequently asking someone under investigation to preserve incriminating evidence.
• “They have been warned” doesn’t cut it. In case you are thinking that it may be OK if an end-user deletes information, even if they do so illegally, think again. The court holds the company and its lawyers responsible for the enforcement of retention policies. For examples of this, see the Qualcomm and the Intel vs. AMD cases.

Our recent survey found that companies are largely catching on. When asked whether companies had formalized and enforced a litigation hold process for email, the results were encouraging:

These numbers are a stark contrast from our survey of March 2007, when 91% said that they had no litigation hold in place.

You may rightly ask, then, what is the alternative to the blanket approach of litigation holds. The answer lies in centralizing control of the information. In the Fortiva archive, creating and enforcing a litigation hold is as easy as a few clicks, and no action is required by end users. With this approach, you can easily implement the best practices that we recommend:

1. Empower legal counsel to oversee litigation hold process and ask IT to demonstrate that litigation holds are being enforced
2. Never rely on end users to enforce a litigation hold
3. Narrow litigation hold to include only responsive information (by keyword, custodian, date range, etc)

If you follow these directions, you will no longer have to retain “all or nothing”. Take a look for yourself.

Read more on the Preparing for FRCP series - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5