On-Demand Email Archiving and Protection of Emails for SMB’s

SonaVault help today’s SMB’s address their business continuity needs as they place an increasing reliance on email. Organizations conduct almost 97% of business communications via email. Email serves as an essential communication tool at every level. Emails today contain a host of valuable and highly sensitive information that needs to be stored, retrieved and viewed on demand. Email archiving is used to systematically record and save information contained in email correspondence to meet these requirements. Email archiving delivers a host of benefits including storage management, regulatory compliancy support, eDiscovery requirements as part of litigation requests and litigation hold to achieve regulatory compliance and operational excellence. Core to the success of SMB’s is an integrated email archiving management strategy, which can be deployed quickly with minimal impact to the existing network environment.

Sonasoft delivers a new generation of email archiving solutions. SonaVault is a stand-alone, software based, powerful and comprehensive email archiving solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. It enables organizations to archive, search and retrieve emails to achieve regulatory compliance and operational excellence. SonaVault Provides seamless access to messages using standard policies, enabling administrators, auditors and end-users quick retrieval of any email stored in Archive with flexible export options.

The software provides roles-based web interface for controlled access. This allows every operation to be fully audited to monitor the usage of the system. Extensive reporting capabilities provide compliance, storage, data leakage and auditing information.

SonaVault for Email Archiving uses built-in Microsoft SQL Server technology to encrypt and archive all emails sent or received through an Exchange Server. It has been designed to facilitate secure email archiving and retrieval for storage management and eDiscovery. SonaVault for Email Archiving specializes in several key areas:

1. Storage Management

Microsoft Exchange servers are deployed worldwide in many countries and organizations. It is not only used as an email server but also as a system to store and manage documents. This places an ever-increasing demand on the server which can result in performance degradation. SonaVault for Email Archiving delivers a fully integrated portfolio of features and tools to lighten a data encumbered Microsoft Exchange server. The resultant effect is an improved efficiency, performance, and better storage management solution.

SonaVault uses stub technology without any client side component installation to reduce the size of the Microsoft Exchange Server. In this process, message contents including attachments are removed from the email and a pointer namely “stub” is created in the email body which has a small footprint compared to the actual message size. This is transparent to the end-user who access emails through Outlook in the usual fashion. Stubbed emails when replied or forwarded, retrieve contents from the SonaVault Store instead of the Microsoft Exchange Server, seamlessly to the end-user.

In addition, SonaVault archives messages in Single-Instance-Storage form while message attachments are in compressed format. SonaVault’s stub technology reduces and keeps Microsoft Exchange Server Storage from growing out of proportion. This reduces the backup cycle and faster recovery of Microsoft Exchange Server in the case of a crash resulting in an operational excellence.

2. Continuous Email Archiving

When used in conjunction with Sonasoft’s Exchange Replication product, Continuous Email Archiving can be achieved without the loss of emails even after the Primary Exchange Server switches over to the Standby Exchange Server. This is due to the fact that the Standby Exchange Server is always online with a pre-configured archiving agent which will start archiving as soon as it assumes the primary –active - role.

With competing solutions, the standby server does not go online until active is taken offline. When the standby server becomes the online server, archiving needs to be configured. As a result, no emails will be archived during this period

3. Secure and Guaranteed Email Archiving

The SonaVault solution employs reliable safeguards including encryption to ensure that the email is tamper-proof without the possibility of being altered. SonaVault uses Microsoft’s Journaling mechanism to extract and archive messages. This ensures that every message which goes out and enters an Microsoft Exchange Server is archived even if the message is deleted by the user from his or her mailbox.

SonaVault extracts messages out of the journal mailbox, digitally signs it, compresses, encrypts and then archive it to SonaVault Archive Stores. Once the messages are successfully archived, they are deleted from the journal mailbox.

4. Archive Existing Emails and PSTs

SonaExchange provides the ability to archive existing emails on the Microsoft Exchange Server and migrate all existing personal store (PST) file data into the archive repository. This will enable organizations to eliminate PST file proliferation across their environment, thus resulting in better email and data storage management.

5. Multi-Domain Email Archiving and Access

One Archive Server can be used to archive emails from users in multiple domains (Child or completely different domain). Users from different domains can be authenticated and provided login access to the SonaVault web console. This unique capability is extremely useful in situations where companies are acquired or spun off and operates as a separate domain where emails are stored on different Microsoft Exchange Servers. 

6. eDiscovery Needs

In a court of law, there is little differentiation between paper-based documentation and email being used as admissible documentation. Electronic discovery (eDiscovery) refers to the process in which electronic data in required with the intent of using it as evidence. SonaVault delivers a practice solution to retrieve tamper-free emails on-demand using simple and advanced search mechanisms. In addition, searches can be customized using a state-of-the art Query Builder which further aids in the process of locating specific emails.

7. Regulatory Compliance Requirements

SonaVault for Email Archiving solution helps meet a wide variety of regulatory compliance requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), SEC requirements and many more worldwide governmental regulations.

The resultant effect of an integrated and flexible email archiving solution translates into an increase in employee and company efficiency. This coupled with high-performance and a fully functional feature set, results in streamlined email management and a reduction of the burden placed on IT staff. SonaVault from Sonasoft provides the user with more control over corporate email while reducing cost, complexity and risk.

8. Role-Based Access

Access to every screen and granular functions on SonaVault Console can be controlled through a role. This role can be assigned to an individual or group of users to limit their access to the system based on their role or function.

9. Auditing

Every single operation of the console is fully audited to ensure the proper usage of the system. It keeps track of users to ensure unauthorized policy changes or searches on the system do not take place.

10. Reporting

Powerful and rich user-friendly reporting tools are provided to monitor the usage of the system. These reports include email statistics, compliance, data leakage, storage management and much more.

The Sonasoft Solution

SonaVault is designed to meet operational excellence, Storage Management, Mailbox Management and regulatory compliance needs such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). SonaVault captures all incoming, outgoing and internal emails and stores them in archive databases as a Single Instance Store (SIS). Also, by use of “stubbing” message contents, including attachments, will be saved in the archive database leaving behind a small pointer, namely “stub” in the body of the email. This approach can reduce the size of the Microsoft Exchange server by up to 80%. SonaVault seamlessly supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. SonaVault provides the ability to migrate all existing PST file data into the archive repository. This will enable SMB’s to eliminate PST files proliferation across their network, resulting in improved email management.