UK Aldermore Bank Opts for C2C Systems

C2C, Systems, Inc., a provider of
email, file and messaging management solutions, announced that Aldermore
Bank has adopted C2C’s ArchiveOne to achieve compliance and retrieval.

The bank, that has become one of the UK’s emerging financial institutions’
despite the current recessionary climate, operates across ten offices with a
head office in Peterborough. It has 600 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes.
Primarily an online bank with over 90% of all our business communication
conducted via email, it is critical that email is optimised, secure and
retrievable at all times.

Like most large institutions, Aldermore Bank were facing growth
issues – it sends and receives approximately 250,000 emails each month, and
experiences a 20% growth rate every 6 months in the size and volume of emails.
Through the bank’s ongoing success and acquisition trail, employee numbers and
mailboxes are estimated to rise by a further 25% in 2012. Compliance has always
been a concern for the Bank, with identification and retrieval on-demand
an ongoing concern to adhere to the compliance requirements
of the Financial Services Act.

Although day-to-day email retrieval requests
were relatively infrequent, Mark Lockwood, Senior Systems Administrator,
explained that when they did come in, the team could spend hours locating
files. If a whole mailbox restore was required, it could take an entire day.
Successful retrieval was wholly reliant on specific identification of the
mailbox user and exact timing of when the mail was sent.

Email Archive Solution
Required
Recognising the need to implement a powerful, easy to use archiving
system, Mark identified three email management companies, including C2C
Systems, to demonstrate their solutions: "Only ArchiveOne had the ability to search both live data and archive
data – the others could only search the archive. In a 24/7 environment, that’s
of critical importance."

Upon rollout, two policies were established to suit Aldermore’s
requirement to keep all email in perpetuity. ArchiveOne was set so that any
email over 4MB in size was sent to the archive; and any
email that was over 90 days old was also transferred to the archive. At the
backend, 3 date-based email data repositories were initially established to
suit the historical infrastructure of the company. Early user experience
endorsed Mark’s initial findings that ArchiveOne was simple to use without over
complicating the process.

One of the first notable achievements from ArchiveOne was to
discover PSTs across all users: The PST files are a result of Microsoft
Outlook’s AutoArchive feature prompting users to store email data on local
drives or network shared drives, making backup and restore
problematic. With ArchiveOne’s PST auto-management feature, these files were automatically
pulled into the archive.

Growth Challenges Also Addressed
"The growing strain on our Exchange
servers has now disappeared." comments Mark. "The demand for storage as we have
successfully archived all areas of the organisation has decreased by more than
60%."

From a user perspective, there has been no appreciable difference in email
usage – a key requirement. Users still see emails listed in inboxes or folders,
but annotated with an ‘A’ symbol, to indicate that emails are stored centrally
on the archive.

Compliance is now enforced. ArchiveOne stores a copy of every email
sent or received at the Bank into a secure repository, enabling rapid message
restore and providing a full audit trail. The fast retrieval is critical for
the bank, where, for instance, personnel have left and transactions may be
subsequently questioned.

Looking forward
The bank experienced a 60% reduction in the size of the data set and
the IT department anticipates a knock-on reduction in the migration timescales
and costs. With Microsoft SharePoint on the roadmap ahead, Mark intends to
implement ArchiveOne for SharePoint to aid capacity, compliance, eDiscovery
and retention management of data from the Microsoft SharePoint server.

Mark concludes: "The use
of ArchiveOne throughout the bank represents a dramatic improvement in the
management of email. It really is an excellent solution from a UK-based highly
knowledgeable team that has met our expectations on every level."