Chester County Turns to Mimosa

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that Chester County, Penn., a region just West of the thriving metropolis of Philadelphia, has deployed the next-generation Mimosa NearPoint software to ensure the retention, preservation, protection, and recovery of its vital email data.

Chester County

Chester County’s government is headquartered in West Chester, a borough of 18,000 people just 25 miles west of Philadelphia. The county is administered by a board of commissioners charged with managing the large and varied governmental organizations. “We are determined to be ahead of the curve on all technology issues—especially eDiscovery,” said Jim Ray, senior technology manager, Chester County.

“We needed a way to seamlessly search through massive amounts of email for legal and HR,” stated Ray. “The legacy process took an exorbitant amount of time and IT resources because we had to crawl all our file systems. The county needed a solution that would address this issue and find the data in a more timely fashion for discovery requests to ensure that we could meet our legal requirements.”
 
The county was also dealing with a PST (Personal Storage Table) file volume that was growing exponentially and driving up storage costs. PST files are used with personal folders to store local copies of messages, calendar events, and other items within Microsoft Exchange. Because they were not designed to store today’s large volumes of data, PST files can quickly become out of control if there is no system for moving, storing, and retaining email in a central archive. Large PST files can lead to poor network performance, increased storage requirements, file corruption, and, inevitably, lost data.

“We had multiple PST files everywhere. One-quarter of our file storage volume was being used by PST files, and that does not include PST’s that were stored on local PCs and laptops,” Ray explained. “With Mimosa, we can safely restrict mailbox size and automatically archive emails in a big electronic filing cabinet. We can improve performance, while ensuring that our data is always safe and discoverable.”

Key Mimosa NearPoint features that are particularly important to Chester County include:

• Automated Exchange Storage Management: Mimosa NearPoint has reduced the county’s storage requirements by moving attachments, based on policies of age and size, to the NearPoint server. The NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature will allow Chester County’s IT staff to define policies that create stub attachments in Exchange while still giving users seamless access to their email.
• Continuous Capture and Archiving of Exchange Data: Mimosa NearPoint includes all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks, so relevant content can be quickly identified as part of an eDiscovery or disclosure request.
• Simple ‘One-Click’ Recovery: Mimosa NearPoint gives Chester County continuous protection of all its Exchange information. NearPoint preserves all Exchange information and allows users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook. In addition, NearPoint allows administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with a simple ‘one-click’ operation.