Vaulting Ahead

Government agencies that are working to become more efficient and secure constantly grapple with new challenges. Perhaps one of the largest challenges is managing the ever-increasing number of ways people communicate with each other -- and the mission-critical data within those communications.

"E-mail is at the core," said Randy Wood, director of Public Sector Solutions for Symantec, "but things like IM and Web collaboration and even file system content and IP telephony are becoming increasingly mission-critical for organizations."

To help government manage and secure its data, Symantec created Enterprise Message Management, a multicomponent solution set that improves the availability, security and value of communications and collaborative systems.

Most experts agree that more than 70 percent of a public-sector organization's intellectual property is contained, in some fashion, within its messaging system. So Symantec Enterprise Message Management focuses on protecting an organization's information, infrastructure and interactions.

Keeping Information Available
As e-mail becomes accepted as certified documentation that can be subpoenaed, audited and subject to the Freedom of Information Act, it becomes vital that e-mail messages -- and other forms of communication, such as IM, fax and voicemail -- be discoverable. Furthermore, employees increasingly need to reference data stored in messaging systems.

Symantec Enterprise Vault^TM archiving solution, the centerpiece of Enterprise Message Management components, helps organizations systematically keep the right data for the right amount of time. Symantec Enterprise Vault centralizes archived data, and uniquely indexes the data to make it searchable, recoverable and discoverable -- as opposed to stovepiped storage systems or .pst files on laptops that store messages separately and in a disorganized manner.

As the number of e-mails increases in an organization, agencies put size limits or quotas on user mailboxes to avoid the expense of purchasing more storage space, which forces information into personal folders scattered about the organization, leading to data manageability problems.

Symantec Enterprise Message Management components reduce the burden on the expensive, primary data storage by moving information to less expensive secondary and tertiary backup systems where data can be compressed and stored in a searchable manner. Many agencies rely on backup tapes to archive information, but tapes are expensive to restore -- and it is necessary to restore them more often than organizations would like.

Symantec Enterprise Message Management components provide an archive repository at the center of the enterprise -- allowing employees to effectively analyze and mine mission-critical data.

"To provide a single vault -- an archive repository in the center of my enterprise -- and be able to interrogate that with different analytic and data mining tools is very valuable," Wood said.

Protecting Data and Infrastructure
As hackers and spammers grow more sophisticated, Symantec security components, like Symantec AntiVirus^TM Enterprise Edition and Symantec^TM Mail Security, help eliminate threats and unwanted messages on the edge of the network before they do harm, including instant messages, which have become a popular vehicle for hackers and other malicious elements.

Symantec's zero-day protection means organizations get protection from the latest viruses and threats as they are discovered.

Threats not only come from external sources, but increasingly they come from within an organization, which is why a layered approach to security is necessary. Symantec tools allow administrators to set security policies that protect the agency's computing environment from the inside out.

Productive Interactions
By securing and managing all IPbased communications, Symantec allows productivity tools to do what they are supposed to do: be productive. Many organizations have been forced to implement policies against productivity tools like instant messaging because they're seen as unmanageable and an up-andcoming threat, but Symantec secures IM from hackers and enables organizations to archive instant messages like e-mails.