State of North Carolina Selects Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that the State of North Carolina has selected Mimosa NearPoint to archive emails for 41,000 state employees.

Mimosa was selected as the archiving vendor of choice from a pool of 29 other archiving vendors who responded to an open state bid. Mimosa will deploy NearPoint in the State’s Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) to perform email retention, eDiscovery, search and retrieval functions for more than one million daily emails which will enable North Carolina to achieve state and federal legal compliance and public record transparency.

The State of North Carolina is the fourth fastest-growing state in the United States and the fastest growing state east of the Mississippi. Supporting the technology infrastructure for state agencies, local governments and educational institutions for this diverse and fast growing state is the ITS office which provides information technology services, including hosting, network and video services, telecommunications, and enterprise services such as email and calendaring. It is the state’s email system that is among the most critical applications supported by the North Carolina ITS office which is tasked with managing, protecting and retaining the more than one million daily emails sent and received by state employees.

In July, 2009, North Carolina State Governor Beverly Purdue signed an executive order directing ITS to obtain an email archive system ‘as soon as practicable.’ This was a critical move to assure compliance since the state’s current backup system is not an archiving system, but only designed to help recover the email system in case of a catastrophic failure. The state required a true archive and eDiscovery solution to assure state and federal legal compliance and so that it could quickly and efficiently respond to litigation-related matters, investigations and public records requests.

“Preserving state emails as a public record is vital to a transparent and accountable government,” said Beverly Perdue, North Carolina State Governor. “Ultimately, a more transparent government will bring about a better government.”

The State of North Carolina selected Mimosa NearPoint as its email archiving and eDiscovery solution of choice because it delivered the following benefits:

• Next-generation email archive: Mimosa NearPoint’s unique software solution does not impact system performance on the state’s email server environment or end-user desktops.
• Continuous capture and archiving of email data: Mimosa NearPoint captures all of the State of North Carolina’s metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and task items, so relevant email content can be quickly identified as part of an eDiscovery or disclosure request.
• Rapid eDiscovery search: Mimosa NearPoint allows end-users to easily identify and discover email content without the need for IT resources. This allows the State of North Carolina to expedite the eDiscovery search process – while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the eDiscovery workflow.
• Email retention and records management: Using Mimosa NearPoint, North Carolina ITS can define policies that allow the State to retain and dispose of email content to ensure compliance and transparency for all email records.

“The selection by the State of North Carolina is a tremendous validation of the value of NearPoint as a comprehensive email archiving solution for the eDiscovery, simplified end-user search, retention and retrieval of vital public records,” said T.M. Ravi, CEO of Mimosa Systems. “This is as critical for public agencies as it is for corporations, and we are pleased to be selected as the best of the 29 archiving solutions North Carolina evaluated.”