Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Non-Profit Eases Storage Issues and Reduces Risk with Email Archiving On-Demand

SITUATION As a non-profit charitable organization with staff all across North America, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) relies heavily on email to conduct their day-to-day activities. With over 1500 full-time employees and a culture that encouraged “saving everything”, LLS faced a number of storage challenges. First, their Exchange store had grown to a point that data restorations were prohibitively time-consuming and difficult. This also had a direct effect on their ability to back-up the network on a regular basis. Additionally, their network storage was growing at an unsustainable rate.

“After conducting a formal analysis and inventory of our storage infrastructure, it was clear that the primary source of our problem was email,“ said Claude Edkins, Vice President of Technology Infrastructure at LLS. “Not only was our Exchange server overburdened, but as much as 70 percent of our network storage was being taken up by PST files.”

In addition to the basic storage concerns, the email situation, including the vast number of PST files scattered on desktops as well as the network storage, brought with it other risk factors. From a disaster recovery perspective, they knew they could not restore all of their email in a reasonable amount of time to effectively keep the organization up and running. The IT team also recognized that if they had to recover historical email in a short period of time for legal discovery or business reasons, they would have a significant problem.

SOLUTION
As Edkins started thinking about how the organization could solve all these issues with a single solution. After researching his options, he came to the conclusion that an email archive was the best answer. Specifically, he decided that Proofpoint Email Archiving was the right choice for LLS.

Ultimately, he decided to on Proofpoint for a few key reasons:

• To gain immediate access to all mail going in and out and across the organization when required (i.e. for business continuity reasons, legal discovery, or HR issues)
• To provide users with access their historical mail through the Proofpoint archive in the event of an Exchange problem that required the organization to restore its email data
• To help manage disk storage and significantly reduce the demands on their Exchange and network storage.

In addition, as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, Proofpoint allowed LLS to implement the archive without adding to their internal IT staff or infrastructure costs.

BENEFITS
Proofpoint addressed the organization's storage management in two key ways. First, by providing end users with access to their historical email through the archive, the IT team could enforce tighter email quotas on the Exchange server, reducing the storage burden, and making it easier to manage and back-up the email server. Additionally, the archive allowed the IT team to restrict the use of PST files, relieving a significant portion of their network storage.

“We contracted with Proofpoint to import all our PST files into the archive,” said Edkins. “If you're an Outlook user, a folder simply shows up in your Outlook mailbox saying 'archived email' and you can search directly from there, regardless of when the email was sent or received, or whether it was deleted from their mailbox already. If they can access all their email in that way, it eliminates the need for end users to save PSTs.”

Since LLS has a large number of transient (part-time and volunteer) workers, having easy access to search through past emails can help them to maintain business continuity and ensure ongoing access to important correspondence such as donation forms.

“We're using it as more than just an archive – it's actually an operational system where people can access information,” said Edkins.

The LLS IT staff consists of about 25 people that support approximately 1500 employees, contractors and an equivalent number of volunteers. According to Edkins, the IT department has a focus on keeping people costs under control.

“The reality is that we're not experts in every area and we never will be, so it just makes sense for us to rely on outside experts for certain things, like email archiving,” said Edkins.

With Proofpoint in place, LLS was able to keep its headcount and hardware, while adding powerful functionality to their IT organization. By optimizing their storage, the solution also has the benefit of relieving the LLS IT team so they could focus on other critical applications.

“Everyone talks about how cheap storage is, but when you're talking about a $90,000 SAN, you're talking about $10 to $12,000 to $18,000 in maintenance costs each year – something that a lot of people don't factor in,” said Edkins. “When we did the math, Proofpoint was a much more cost-effective solution than trying to maintain the equivalent infrastructure in-house.”

As a non-profit organization, it is critical that LLS be prepared to meet any legal or compliance requirements. They also place a high value on protecting their brand and credibility. They see email archiving as playing an important role in both of these areas.

“It only takes one judgment to really hurt you,” said Edkins. “I don't want to be the part of the organization that can't respond to a court-ordered subpoena for documents. I want to be able to provide that information, and provide it with credibility/verifiability that this was actually the message that was sent or received. And I'd like to be able to do it without having to call in the National Guard to help us.”

While LLS hasn't yet faced a legal discovery request, they have used the archive to retrieve data for other reasons.

“We had a person who left the organization and before they left, they deleted their whole mailbox, including some important organizational correspondence,” said Edkins. “Well, we had a copy of absolutely everything sent and received sitting in the archive – We were able to retrieve their whole mail history information and export it to a PST in literally under 5 minutes.”

ABOUT THE LEUKEMIA & LYMPHOMA SOCIETY
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is the world's largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services. It has over 1500 full-time employees plus 1000 part-time and volunteer workers working out of 103 locations.