Customer Spotlight - STV, Incorporated
As one of the country’s top 25 Engineering and Architecture firms STV Incorporated must adhere to many regulatory requirements for monitoring, protection, retention, and retrieval of email messages. In addition, the company needed a consistent end user interface for storing and locating email and folder data related to projects for long periods of time. With 1,525 professional, technical and support personnel; the company was looking for a way to better manage the data related to projects and preserve important documents beyond the life of the project. STV did not want to buy, install, and learn EMail Archiving solutions; instead, it sought a trusted partner who could implement a cost-effective, secure, and compliant solution. The company also enthusiastically endorsed Managed EMail Archiving Services for reducing the administrative burden of email management.
Situation
STV is a leading, award-winning professional firm offering engineering, architectural, planning, environmental and construction management services. The company consistently ranks among the country's top 25 firms in education, highways, bridges, rail and mass transit. Throughout the United States, STV offers services to a broad and ever-expanding client base providing planning, environmental, design, program and construction management, and specialty services for the transportation, design-build, institutional and commercial building, advanced technology, industrial and defense markets.
Based in Douglasville, Pennsylvania, STV has additional offices in 16 other states. The company employs more than 1,500 professional, technical and support personnel.
In October 2007, STV reached a critical juncture. The company completed a migration of its messaging platform from IBM Lotus Domino to Microsoft Exchange and required a consistent method of capturing email data related to projects and preserving important documents beyond the life of projects for both regulatory compliance and legal discovery purposes.
Ronald Wiseman, Chief Information Officer of STV, realized that end users were storing project related data within the messaging platform and required access to the many years.
This created a challenge for his IT staff in managing the mail server environment. Ron needed a way to preserve the data while providing a simple and consistent end user interface. Ron wanted the data to be stored offsite at a security-rich data center but didn’t have the time and resources to implement an in-house solution.
“We realized that we had to bring in an expert if we were going to be up and running quickly”, says Ron Wiseman. “We needed a partner to come in and implement a system that wasn’t time-consuming and required no significant capital outlay.”
End users had been migrated to the new messaging platform and were continuing to store project related data in the mail server, so Wiseman immediately sought out a service-based messaging archive system. An outsourced solution would not require additional hardware or software to manage on-premise, transferring the burden of application support to the service provider, and resulting in lower costs and more efficient use of the company’s precious IT resources.
Solution
Wiseman chose to take a closer look at Hosted EMail Archiving Services. Initially, his management team had concerns over the potential security issues of using a service provider, but they were Immediately put at ease after viewing the security features.
“With the predictable monthly rate that Hosted EMail Archiving Services provides, there is no way that an in-house solution could have offered us even a remotely similar application cost effectively”, says Wiseman. The service provider stays up to date on legislative changes or interpretations that may affect our compliance to records retention requirements.
STV needed an email archiving solution that provided flexibility and a completely tamper-proof message store. It also had to include a supervisory system for regular review of incoming and outgoing messages, based on statistical sampling. Finally, it needed the capability to search and retrieve project related email data and important documents well beyond the life of a project.
Benefits
With Hosted EMail Archiving Services, STV Incorporated has gained a comprehensive email compliance and archiving service. Messages aimed at STV’s 1,500+ professional, technical and support personnel are intercepted and stored in a secure archive. Searching for and retrieving important project related email data and documents has become a painless process because of the intuitive user interface. And because the archive is accessible by each employee, the administrative burden of recovering past project related email data and documents has been eliminated.
“Rarely do you find a company that delivers a solution that does exactly what it claims. We put the email archiving solution through some rigorous testing and in all instances the service proves its merit,” says Wiseman. “Hosted EMail Archiving services provided all the tools required for off-site message retention and recovery,” says Wiseman. “It also offered a one-stop shop for all our message archival requirements.”
Achieved Efficient Recovery
As projects proceed through the lifecycle and conclude, often times important project related data needs to be discovered and recalled many years after the project. When STV Incorporated faced a situation of needing long term storage and a consistent and intuitive user interface to search and retrieve data, it used the Hosted EMail Archiving service. Using the service, the company can easily locate important email data and documents. Without the solution in place, the organization would have had to access allocations where the email data and documents might exist by digging through backup tapes, file cabinets, desktop computers, and offline media.
“Hosted EMail Archiving provides benefits beyond those required by regulatory agencies,” says Wiseman.
