South African value-added distributor of business enhancing ICT solutions AmVia has completed a project to assist Sage Financial in its aim of complying with EFT regulations while improving the efficiency of this high-profile organisation`s e-mail system.
When it came time to ensure that its business-related communications were archived in compliance with the latest legislation, and without the ancillary costs of higher storage requirements or productivity losses caused by disrupting the ability of the server itself to deliver this data in a timely fashion, Sage head of technology and programme management Shaan Watkins requested that a number of available options be evaluated. Over a period of three months, his outsourcing partner EDS installed various solutions and examined their abilities in detail to discover which could deliver exactly what this financial institution required.
"From this evaluation we found EMC Legato EmailXtender to be the best solution overall. Not only was it able to easily bring our system into compliance with the regulatory requirements on communication, it also provided the highest levels of functionality, was very user-friendly and able to generate the most perceptive management reports," states Watkins.
"Previously there was no e-mail storage system in place, so when the ECT Act and other financial sector legislation related to corporate governance was introduced we knew we would have to implement an e-mail archiving solution to be compliant with these regulations," he continues. "Now thanks to AmVia and our outsource partner EDS we have a system that meets this requirement entirely for the 870 connected users, with the objective of having 1 500 Sage employees from across the country online by the end of 2005."
Comments Ian Wakeford, Client Delivery manager at EDS: "We`re currently in the second and final phase of implementation at Sage, and are busy building the rules-set, based on the unique business processes employed by the organisation. Once these rules have been configured, the EmailXtender solution will deliver additional value to the organisation over and above mere regulatory compliance."
Sage Financial has taken the opportunity to simultaneously update its storage environment, with EmailXtender taking care of this critical component of e-mail archiving and retrieval. An EMC SAN system running on Dell equipment will incorporate the Legato software as part of a comprehensive disaster recovery solution for the organisation.
"EDS has been our outsourcing partner of choice for seven years and over this period the organisation has consistently delivered excellent service to us. We have also been very impressed with the assistance that AmVia itself was able to provide in this implementation. They really came to the party, providing support and skills transfer right the way through the implementation phase," comments Watkins.
With its new Legato EmailXtender solution in place, Sage Financial is able to focus on making sound decisions for its clients, secure in the knowledge that its e-mail message pool is being stored in full compliance with corporate governance legislation. The software will also ensure that the server itself continues delivering this critical information as quickly as possible without excessive mail storage files slowing the system down.
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