09 May 2007- Forensics and Compliance Systems (FCS) has announced the availability of its Cryoserver Forensic Archiving appliance to the local market, a forensic archiving and compliance solution for e-mail, instant messaging and other electronic records.
The multi-platform Cryoserver system will provide South African businesses with forensic grade compliance, protected, multilingual searching and will enable the removal of the e-mail data management burden from administrators.
The Cryoserver, either as appliance or software solution, is available through Condyn, the preferred distributor of premier security risk mitigation solutions. According to Paul Platen, risk and compliance manager at Condyn, it has become widely accepted that e-mail is the most business critical application in the world. "Recent studies: Computing SA, April 2007, page 36, has shown that the number of e-mail mailboxes grew from 253 million in 1998 to nearly 1.6 billion in 2006. During the same period, sent e-mails grew threefold and e-mail traffic from one person accounted for six exabytes.
"An exabyte (derived from the SI prefix exa-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quintillion bytes," he explains. Much of the communication via e-mail now includes (but is not limited to) contract terms or change of terms; communication between suppliers, contractors, customers and employees; transactions; personnel records; sensitive personal data; intellectual property, including designs, plans and so on; and legal council and advice, either as attachments or body copy. "Most of this content remains in the electronic form and this in itself places an immense burden on the storage infrastructure and has definite implications for regulatory archiving and storage requirements."
E-mail storage issues
"With e-mail becoming increasingly critical, it has become acceptable for users to keep all e-mails regardless of their age or value to the organisation," says Platen. "This consumes vast resources and as a result develops into operational challenges for network support staff and administrators as these servers rapidly fill up.
"In addition, finding e-mails has become problematic due to factors such as poor organisation, poor indexing, unstructured data and attachment searching not possible. E-mail backup is expensive and it is becoming more challenging technically as companies have to deal with huge data volumes. The existing tape and policy based solutions are not tenable and even if backups are done, restoration is questionable."
Cryoserver e-mail archiving appliance
The design criteria for Cryoserver was heavily influenced by concerns from Internet service providers back in 2000 that they would need to retain and search trillions of e-mails in response to pending legislation.
The result today is a solution that supports carrier-grade data volumes yet remains affordable by organisations of all sizes. The strong emphasis on auditing and forensic procedures means businesses can meet the growing need for data retention while at the same time protecting the privacy rights of those to which their data relates.
Benefits of the Cryoserver e-mail archiving appliance include:
* Records e-mail (encrypted and compressed);
* Prevents indiscriminate deletion or alteration of any e-mails;
* Speedy search and recovery by authorised users or as part of a formal investigation procedure;
* Compliant audit trailing and reporting;
* Highly scalable distributed architecture;
* Real-time replication to secondary site;
* Imports existing e-mail archives;
* Multilingual searching and ability to search within attachments
* Easy to install with no need to train users;
* Outlook, Lotus and GroupWise Integration;
* Disaster Recovery - end-users have access to retrieve their own e-mail; and
* Reporting.
"The Cryoserver`s true forensic grade compliance sets this archiving solution apart from other technologies, as does the fact that no policies or administration are required to maintain complete record of e-mail transactions. It is also easy to install as no third-party components are required and features integrated disaster recovery and backup and a bundled offline archive.
"This technology is backed up by Condyn`s local support offering," adds Platen. "Appliances and spares will be available locally to ensure prompt and efficient service to clients."
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