Source Interlink Selects LiveOffice Hosted Email Archiving

LiveOffice, provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) email archiving, email compliance and email continuity solutions, announced that Source Interlink has deployed LiveOffice Personal Archive, LiveOffice Discovery Archive and LiveOffice Email Continuity to meet its e-discovery preparedness needs and retention policy enforcement, while also addressing soaring data stores and rapidly growing hardware and administrative costs.

With more than 7,000 employees and three major operating divisions, Source – one of the largest publishers of magazines and online content for enthusiasts, and a leading distributor of DVDs, CDs, magazines, games and books – needed an email archiving solution that was seamless and did not interrupt day-to-day business operations. Source’s previous legal discovery process was extremely tedious and time consuming, because all of its archives were on tape backups. Plus, finding specific data was virtually impossible with ‘point-in-time’ tape restores.

Prior to choosing LiveOffice, Source considered various other hosted and on-premise archiving providers, including MessageOne, Mimosa Systems NearPoint and Symantec Enterprise Vault. “With the on-premise solutions, providing access to our outside legal counsel would be a real challenge,” said Paul Haisman, one of the company’s directors of information technology (IT). “We’d have to create internal email addresses and provide VPN access to our network in order for our lawyers to access and search the archive.”

“E-Discovery was definitely our primary driver,” said Haisman. “Our legal hold backup tapes alone are in the thousands.”

Email Archiving Enhances Storage Management
In addition to meeting e-discovery requirements, Source needed to solve rapidly compounding storage issues. With its data stores growing more than 91 percent in just four months, Haisman knew it was time to implement an email archiving solution that could not only meet the company’s e-discovery demands, but also keep the Exchange environment’s backup times manageable and improve the overall performance of all of its on-premise servers. LiveOffice archiving enabled Source to do just that. Since data is stored in the cloud and safely replicated in geographically dispersed data centers, there’s no need to store any of the data locally.

“Cloud email archiving takes a lot of the worrying out of the IT department,” noted Haisman. “It has helped us significantly reduce backup and restore times. Plus, smaller mailbox sizes have improved server performance, and storage costs have dramatically decreased. In addition, since each user has Personal Archive, they can delete older emails with confidence, knowing they still have quick-and-easy access to messages whenever they need them, alleviating many mailbox management and storage challenges.”

Beyond reducing expenditures and optimizing its storage infrastructure, Source was also impressed with the built-in disaster recovery and email continuity functionality that is packaged at no additional charge with LiveOffice email archiving solutions. In the event of a complete server failure, Haisman estimated that a full restore of his Exchange environment would take more than 24 hours with his old system. Now Source benefits from LiveOffice’s email continuity solution, which ensures that its email continues to run in the event of a primary mail server failure.

The High Costs of Not Archiving
After thorough research, Source discovered that the consequences of not archiving are a six-figure matter. “When you add up extra backup tapes for litigation holds, fulfillment of legal discovery requests, extra disk space, disaster recovery and replication, we estimate an annual cost of more than $200,000 not to archive,” said Haisman. Source ultimately chose LiveOffice because it provided the organization with the scalable, fully hosted, cloud email archiving solution it needed. “Not only does LiveOffice offer all of the features we needed and then some, but its fixed per mailbox, per month pricing structure is second to none,” said Haisman. “Plus, the very short administrative learning curve and fast implementation time made it the most logical choice to meet our needs. We couldn’t be more pleased with the results.”