Proofpoint ARCHIVE: Email Archiving

Proofpoint ARCHIVE™ is an on-demand email archiving solution that addresses three key challenges—email storage management, legal discovery and regulatory compliance—without the headaches of managing an email archive in-house. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, it can be deployed in days, with minimal upfront costs and planning. And because Proofpoint takes care of everything from storage to security issues, the archive can be easily managed by your existing messaging IT staff. Proofpoint ARCHIVE can be used by any enterprise that uses the Microsoft Exchange email server.

Benefits of Proofpoint's Email Archiving Solution

Patented DoubleBlind Encryption™ guarantees that your data is fully protected in transit and in the cloud.

Always be ready for litigation and regulatory audit requests with Proofpoint ARCHIVE's centralized, searchable, policy-based archive.

High-speed search technology returns results in 20 seconds or less.

Easily create and enforce legal holds during eDiscovery; comply with SEC and FINRA regulations for email.

Email end-users are more productive with easy, self-service access to all their historical email.

Improves email system performance and simplifies email system management through automated removal of large attachments ("stubbing") and PST file elimination.

“Our research shows that the vast majority of enterprise IT organizations have been required to search through backups to retrieve one or more email messages in the past 3 years. Companies of all sizes should be archiving email, so they are prepared to meet the legal discovery, supervisory and retention requirements that impact them. On demand email archiving services are ideal for organizations that want to quickly deploy a solution without large upfront investments of capital or internal IT resources.”

- Michael Osterman, President, Osterman Research

Video Demo: View Proofpoint Email Archiving Demonstration and Download e-Discovery Whitepaper
Webinar: Email Archiving on Demand: Learn the Reasons, Risks and Rewards
White Paper: Email Archiving: Cost Savings and Other Benefits from SaaS
White Paper: Email Archiving: Understanding the Reasons, Risks and Rewards
Free Email Archiving TCO Audit: Learn how much your organization can save

Proofpoint ARCHIVE: SaaS/Hybrid Architecture
Screenshot: Friendly, Outlook-inspired interface
Screenshot: Search archived email

Email Archiving for Legal Discovery, Regulatory Compliance and Storage Management

Proofpoint ARCHIVE securely archives a copy of every internal and external email in Proofpoint’s state-of-the-art data centers, and provides customers with easy access to their messages at all times.

The Convenience of SaaS, the Security of On-premises Email Archiving

Proofpoint’s email archiving solution consists of two components—an on-premises appliance and Proofpoint’s network of secure data centers. By combining on-demand storage with an on-premises appliance, Proofpoint offers the convenience of SaaS while providing the highest levels of security and integration available. The Proofpoint ARCHIVE appliance sits inside your network, connecting directly with your Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory servers. DoubleBlind Encryption™ means your data is fully protected, then fully protected again. Messages are first encrypted on-site, on the Proofpoint appliance, before being sent to a secure offsite data center. Since only you have the encryption key, only you can access your archive.

Tight Integration with Microsoft Exchange

The Proofpoint ARCHIVE appliance provides tight integration with your existing messaging infrastructure. Taking advantage of Microsoft Exchange journaling, the appliance logs into Exchange and retrieves a copy of every email at configurable time intervals before clearing those messages from the journaling mailbox. Unlike other managed solutions, the Proofpoint appliance pulls messages from the journaling mailbox, so email will never be lost, even if the appliance or your network goes down.
The appliance also allows Proofpoint ARCHIVE to leverage data from Active Directory (AD). The result is greatly simplified management because any changes made within AD are automatically reflected in the archive. Proofpoint ARCHIVE does not impact your Active Directory settings and does not require schema changes.

On-Demand Access to Real-time Search

Proofpoint is the only email archiving vendor that offers a search performance guarantee, ensuring reliable access to archived data. Unlike in-house solutions that can experience serious search degradation and require ongoing hardware upgrades as the archive grows, Proofpoint provides access to hundreds of servers, on demand. Since the cost of search performance is shared between customers, access to real-time search remains cost-effective regardless of how large the archive grows or how often searches are required. This high level of search performance is achieved using a distributed, grid storage architecture with parallel search technology similar to that used by major search engines.

Easy-to-Enforce Retention Policies

Proofpoint’s policy engine allows you to create, maintain and—most importantly—enforce a clear corporate retention policy for email. A basic policy template is provided to get you started—from there, you can customize the solution to enforce even the most granular policies. All administration is performed from an easy-to-use, browser-based interface, allowing your compliance or legal staff to manage the process without the help of IT.

Enforcement of the policy is automatic—a single click from the user interface is all that’s needed to make the policy active. Every policy change is tracked in an unalterable audit trail, ensuring an accurate record of your organization’s policy changes.

Advanced Searches for Easy Legal Discovery

Proofpoint ARCHIVE provides advanced search features that meet even the most stringent legal discovery and review requirements. Using a web-based interface, your legal or IT team can easily conduct a full-text search across the message header, message body and contents of more than 250 types of attachments. Search results can be saved in folders where duplicate messages are automatically removed. From there, you can print the results, retrieve them to your own mailbox, or export them into PST files for online download or delivery on removable media.

Easily Enforced Litigation Hold

To adequately enforce a litigation hold, IT must ensure that every email is kept indefinitely, until the matter is closed. With Proofpoint ARCHIVE in place, the litigation hold process is simple and complete.

In the case of impending lawsuits, Proofpoint allows you to define a litigation hold for each legal case, which temporarily exempts messages from their assigned retention period. Using the web-based user interface, legal counsel or IT can search for relevant messages and copy them to a hold folder where they remain for as long as the hold is required.

Reduced Exchange Store with Stubbing

Stubbing features allow you to optionally manage mailbox sizes by removing storage-intensive attachments from Exchange while keeping those attachments easily accessible to Outlook users. With stubbing in place, users are able to access their attachments seamlessly through their existing Outlook folder structure—even though attachments are retrieved from the archive rather than Exchange.

Since up to 80 percent of email data is stored in attachments, removing them from Exchange can result in virtually unlimited mailboxes for end-users, making it easy for them to stay within their mailbox quotas.

Eliminate PST Use with End-User Access to Archives

Without deploying any additional components, Proofpoint ARCHIVE can automatically create a special folder within Outlook that allows users to search through all their archived email in real-time. When a user clicks on the folder, the Proofpoint ARCHIVE search screen appears in the main Outlook window, allowing users to quickly and easily perform advanced searches.

With real-time searching of archived messages by end-users, IT can eliminate the use of PSTs, and reduce exposure to risk at the same time. IT doesn’t have to spend time recovering lost or accidentally deleted messages, since users can do it themselves. Overall end-user productivity goes up, and the burdens on IT are decreased.

Supervision for Regulatory Compliance

Proofpoint ARCHIVE makes it easy to meet even the most stringent regulatory compliance demands by archiving all email according to SEC-compliant email storage policies. Easy access to search and real-time email retrieval makes the compliance audit process painless. Supervision review features in Proofpoint ARCHIVE allow compliance staff to systematically review email sent by employees. Messages that are selected for review—either as potential policy violations or through a random sampling process—are placed in a queue for review by authorized users. Those users can quickly review the messages in the queue, “passing” messages that are not of concern and “failing” messages that require further review or escalation.

Insight through Detailed, Easy-to-Access Reports

Proofpoint's email archiving solution provides numerous reports to help you properly assess email patterns and behavior. Authorized users can get immediate access to detailed reports that on a wide variety of subjects including: storage growth and email usage over time; the amount of email storage usage by user groups and individuals; the amount of email sent internally versus externally; supervision reports; and risk assessment reports indicating policy adherence.

Proven Technology

Proofpoint ARCHIVE is based on technology originally developed by Fortiva, Inc.—now a part of Proofpoint, Inc.—and trusted by hundreds of enterprises worldwide.

Guaranteed Data Privacy

Proofpoint’s DoubleBlind Encryption™ technology guarantees the security of your data, ensuring that no one outside your organization can access your archived data. When a message reaches the Proofpoint archiving appliance, it is encrypted before being sent outside the customer firewall over a secure connection to Proofpoint’s data centers.

Messages are only decrypted when an authorized user on your network conducts a search from Outlook or from Proofpoint’s web-based user interface. Your data can never be viewed without access to both your Proofpoint archiving appliance (which resided within your network) and the Proofpoint data centers. Not even Proofpoint’s own staff can access the contents of your encrypted archived data.

Proofpoint's SaaS/hybrid email archiving solution offers a wide variety of benefits over traditional, in-house email archiving solutions.

Reliable, Redundant Storage

With Proofpoint, you get on-demand access to a redundant storage infrastructure that scales with your growing needs. And with Proofpoint managing everything, you don’t have to worry about monitoring, provisioning storage, or backing up your archive. Proofpoint ARCHIVE gives you:

Copies of every archived message in multiple data centers
Continuous data validation
Expert staff monitoring and adding storage capacity on an ongoing basis

Lower Total-Cost-of-Ownership

Proofpoint’s SaaS archiving solution takes advantage of a multi-tenant architecture model. This means that you benefit from lower costs because the physical back-end hardware infrastructure is shared among many different customers. It also means:

No significant upfront costs for storage
Capacity can be incrementally increased without having to buy large blocks of storage
High-performance, real-time search results on demand

Better Customer Service

Proofpoint delivers unsurpassed customer service and protection from unexpected service disruptions. We also guarantee:

24/7/365 technical support with prompt response to all issues
Issues with hardware and appliances will be managed by Proofpoint
Access to ongoing product enhancements and upgrades are included as part of your subscription

Forensically Compliant Email Storage

To ensure data meets the highest evidentiary standards, Proofpoint guarantees that records cannot be deleted or altered once they have been archived. Proofpoint ensures the authenticity and accessibility of all archived data by:

Storing multiple copies of messages and indexes on spinning disks
Digitally fingerprinting all messages and attachments
Maintaining a full audit trail of user activities and systems
Archiving in native format, ensuring that all message metadata is retained

Legal Discovery Benefits of Using Proofpoint for Email Archiving

The growing cost of e-discovery, compounded by new regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), has changed the way businesses must deal with email. To be prepared for legal discovery, a business must know where all their email data is stored, and be able to search through and retrieve that data in a short period of time. They must also apply a consistent email retention policy, and have a way to enforce a litigation hold by preventing data from being deleted if necessary.

For companies that allow PSTs and rely on backup tapes to store historical email, both the cost and time involved in meeting these requirements can be very high. Exposure to legal risk is also significant, with missing or corrupt data resulting in spoliation of evidence. This can lead to costly fines, guilty verdicts and damaged reputations.

The on-demand Proofpoint ARCHIVE solution makes it easy to respond to e-discovery requests and meet the requirements of the FRCP by:

Storing all email in a central repository with real-time search from a browser interface and a simple retrieval process.
Enforcing consistent retention policies and litigation holds.
Allowing legal counsel to conduct advanced searches for early case assessment and full e-discovery requests.

Regulatory Compliance Benefits of Using Proofpoint ARCHIVE

From Sarbanes-Oxley to SEC rules, numerous legislative requirements have been introduced that dictate how electronic records are retained and retrieved. Organizations that fail to meet regulatory compliance requirements can face significant risks including large fines and prison sentences, plus serious, long term damage to their corporate reputations.

This on-demand email archiving solution was designed to meet the most stringent regulatory compliance requirements with:

Policy-driven archiving that allows businesses to easily customize and enforce a consistent email retention policy.
Supervision tools that allow businesses to implement a systematic and flexible supervision process for selecting and reviewing the content of electronic messages.
Real-time search through a web-based user interface, allowing compliance staff to easily meet audit and discovery requirements.
Guarantees that records cannot be deleted or altered after archiving as well as data authenticity measures such as digital fingerprinting, a full audit trail of user activities, and multiple copies of all data stored on SEC 17a-4 compliant storage.

Email Storage Management Benefits of Proofpoint ARCHIVE

As email volume and attachment sizes continue to grow, the burden on storage also increases. Since corporate email servers weren’t designed to store large volumes of data for extended periods of time, overloading Exchange can result in significant performance issues and prohibitively long backup windows.

Enforcing tighter email quotas can relieve this issue, but that often leads to an even bigger problem as end users save email data in personal folders or PST files. This simply shifts the storage problem to a different location while increasing your organization’s exposure to legal risks.

By securely storing a copy of every email sent and received, Proofpoint’s email archive can address these issues in multiple ways:

Stubbing technology replaces storage-intensive attachments from Exchange with a link to the archived file, allowing IT to reduce the message store by up to 80 percent.
A smaller Exchange message store means improved server performance, shorter Exchange backup times, and fewer demands on IT.
With end user access to archived data, businesses can eliminate the use of PSTs while providing a virtually unlimited mailbox size.