Proofpoint Enterprise Archive: Migrating Legacy Email

Proofpoint can natively import data in PST file format. In addition, Proofpoint has relationships with best-of-breed providers that specialize in file format migrations to address a wide variety of other data types and media for importing. The entire email migration process is managed by the Proofpoint Professional Services team.

Yes. Proofpoint Professional Services can manage data extracted from legacy email archiving solutions and import it into your Proofpoint Enterprise Archive. Depending upon your current email legacy archiving solution, Proofpoint will coordinate with services partners to migrate email from a backup of your existing email archiving system's data. In other cases, you may choose to export the data to PST files. All email archive migration projects commence with a Statement of Work (SOW) that will outline the process and any additional conversion costs for your specific environment.

Yes. Proofpoint Professional Services can take a series of end user PST files, perform email message de-duplication, and import them into your Proofpoint Enterprise Archive.

Yes. Proofpoint Professional Services will work with you to evaluate existing email retention policies and legal hold status in order to determine the appropriate email migration strategy for each specific data category.

Yes. In coordination with services partners, Proofpoint can extract data from Exchange backup tapes, merge the data into a unified view and import it into your Proofpoint Enterprise Archive.

Proofpoint Professional Services can handle a wide variety of media formats including DVDs and tapes. To find out if a specific format is supported, and whether incremental third party conversion costs will be incurred, contact Proofpoint Professional Services.

Proofpoint utilizes a multi-phased approach to email migration projects:

• Phase 1: Pre-Migration Planning: Proofpoint will carry out a detailed analysis of the customer environment that includes establishing and reviewing customer requirements and expectations, reviewing email migration server requirements, and designing an email migration plan.
• Phase 2: Installation and Setup of Extraction Environment and Pilot: The objective of this phase is to set up the environment, discover the optimum operating guidelines for the customer, and determine the likely throughput levels achievable with the target configuration of systems.
• Phase 3: Extraction from Original Archive to PST File Format: Once the email migration plan is finalized based on the outcome of Phase 2, the main portion of the extraction can begin. Proofpoint will perform services to extract all available data from the original email archive, convert the email data to PST file format, and output the data onto media provided by the customer.
• Phase 4: Project Close: Once the email archive migration has been verified as fully completed and validated with the customer, then the project environment will be dismantled. If hardware was provided by Proofpoint, then the customer will ensure that hardware is returned to Proofpoint.

The following information is reviewed before a project begins in order to estimate project time and scope:

• Current and planned email retention policies
• Current and planned Exchange mailbox quotas
• Policies for allowing use of PSTs
• State and volume of migrated data sources (Exchange data, PSTs, existing archived data, data contained on back-up tapes)
• Data filtering requirements
• Requirements to import items directly to legal holds
• Requirements to apply info tags to imported email
• Internal resourcing plans (if any) to extract data
• Timeframe objectives and constraints

Proofpoint Professional Services will take the source data in PST format and convert it into Proofpoint's standard data import format. Part of this conversion process includes tagging the message with the appropriate target disposition date (based on date the message was received) for email retention purposes. Once the data has been prepared for import, it is moved to a queue to be imported by our archive intake servers. The intake process includes extraction of attachment contents, full text indexing and writing data into the archive.

Yes. Proofpoint Professional Services will work with customers who are seeking a selective or phased email migration, whether that is driven by custodians, date range, or other criteria.

All email migration projects start with the creation of a statement of work by Proofpoint Professional Services that will include deliverables, expected completion times and pricing. Specific timeframes are determined by the amount of data to be migrated, the format of the data, and our experience with converting that data source to Proofpoint's standard import format.

Proofpoint provides a utility that captures a snapshot of the current mailbox information from Active Directory. This information is used in the email archive process to associate messages to mailboxes, which in turn determines which users can access which messages. Proofpoint can perform a preliminary analysis of all message data to find these old mailboxes and provide a report, allowing customers to map old mailboxes to the current mailboxes belonging to active users.

Yes. Imported data is fully indexed, including full-text indexing of message and attachment contents. While the Proofpoint import process will attempt to resolve email addresses back to Active Directory users, this may not be possible for older data, as is the case when the mailbox no longer exists. As such, searching for messages based upon the parties involved may require searching for SMTP addresses or display names.

To import messages, all data must be delivered to Proofpoint in an unencrypted format. However, to protect data in transit, files can be transmitted to Proofpoint encrypted with PGP.

In addition, to store the data in the email archive, Proofpoint Professional Services will require a copy of the customer's Proofpoint Encryption key for the duration of the import process. Proofpoint will certify that, once the import process is complete, all copies of that specific key will be purged from all systems.

In addition to encrypting data via PGP as mentioned earlier, data migrated from legacy sources fully protects data fidelity and integrity. Email migration projects are tracked within Proofpoint's customer tracking system with migrated media containing PST files and the MD5 hash values for those files. Files are validated against those MD5 values as they enter a migration staging area, and then again as they are ingested within the email archiving process. For each migrated PST file, reports are created that include:

• Number of items in the source PST file
• Number of items rejected as an unsupported type
• Number of items not added as they duplicate another item already processed
• Number of items not added as they are older than the email retention policy
• Number of items added to the email archive