Southcentral Foundation Selects Atempo

Atempo, Inc. announced that Southcentral Foundation, a nonprofit health care organization that serves nearly 60,000 Alaska Native and American Indian people, has implemented Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging to automate and manage the archival of over 180,000 daily inbound and outbound e-mails.

Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging (ADAM) enables Southcentral Foundation to reduce the time and cost of searching e-mails for e-discovery, comply with HIPAA and other regulatory requirements, and cost-effectively manage the growth of its messaging data storage.

Based in Anchorage, Alaska, Southcentral Foundation (SCF) is an internationally-recognized, award-winning health care organization with over 1,400 employees and 60 health care programs and services. SCF provider teams use e-mail to collaborate on patient care and to communicate directly with patients. Given the sensitive nature of these discussions, careful handling of e-mails is required to ensure privacy, meet regulatory compliance and support the legal team with litigation cases.

When the foundation expanded its services and tripled its staff in just a few years, e-discovery requests also tripled. It took the IT team two to three days to track down relevant e-mails from backup tapes, and without full confidence that the results were complete. The growth also strained their e-mail servers, and left the IT team looking for ways to contain the size of the Exchange database and its underlying storage. After reviewing multiple alternatives, Southcentral Foundation found that Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging offered the best value for the broadest capabilities, and selected it as its first e-mail archiving solution.

"In our year of archiving with ADAM, we have had nothing but good experiences," said Jason Hamlett, ITS Systems Manager at Southcentral Foundation. "The product and Atempo’s support have both been outstanding. The fact that we’re now able to retain all e-mails while not having to expand our storage capacity in over a year has exceeded our expectations."

Since implementing ADAM across its entire system, Southcentral Foundation has significantly reduced the turnaround time for e-discovery requests. Previously a laborious project that took two to three days to complete, full sets of e-mails can now be searched and retrieved within a matter of minutes. In addition to this enhanced support for SCF’s litigation needs, ADAM’s comprehensive indexing and rich search capabilities are a significant advantage to the human resources department for internal investigations. The software’s user-friendly interface also gives SCF employees easy self-service archive access, while its archive management capabilities allow the organization to configure consistent retention policies that satisfy HIPAA requirements and other strict regulations.

Moreover, ADAM’s deduplication capabilities allow SCF to realize significant cost-savings through storage efficiency. In the past, SCF struggled to control e-mail storage volumes, which often required a new storage disk to be purchased every month. With expected deduplication ratios from 60-90 percent, the storage requirements for e-mail are kept under control.

"Without a strong e-mail archiving strategy, it does not take long for any organization to see its e-mail storage volumes spiral out of control," said Marylise Tauzia, Director of Product Management & Marketing at Atempo. "Organizations like Southcentral Foundation that have thousands of users generating hundreds of thousands of daily e-mails require a solution that offers superior functionality for each facet of e-mail archiving. Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging eases the IT burden of managing one’s storage environment while ensuring that all messaging content is properly retained for e-discovery and regulatory needs."

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