3 simple strategies to preserve and manage unstructured data of former employees

Copyright © 2019 Mithi Software Technologies Pvt Ltd. All rights reserved.
3 Simple Strategies to
Preserve & Manage
unstructured data of
former employees
SUNIL UTTAM
Co-founder & Principal Solution Architect
Mithi Software Technologies.
Connect with Sunil
DEC 19 2019
12:00 NOON - 12:45 PM IST

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Sunil Uttam
Chief Solution Architect & co-founder
Mithi Software Technologies
Cloud Data Management - Simplified
Sunil helps senior leaders, CIOs, CISOs to gain insights, understand risks, and map their
digital data management journey via a well researched data driven approach and helps
them transition from they are into a digitally Dexter future in manageable steps.
Essentially, Sunil’s work focusses on listening to customers and simplifying data
management for them with scalable, secure and cost optimized cloud based solutions.

Agenda
• Why preserve data of former employees?
• Common methods deployed today and their drawbacks
• 3 Simple strategies to help you preserve and manage unstructured
data better.
• How the cloud can aid in your data management strategy
• Your queries answered.

Poll
Why do you want to preserve data generated by former employees?
(Select all that apply)
• For Audit readiness and regulation compliance
• To capture and leverage the IP generated by the employee
• For litigation readiness
• The law requires this
• For backup and restoration to help the successor

2 Kinds of Data
Structured Data
Typically stored in database records, generated from business work flow processes,
codified via forms. Examples include Leads, quotations, customer information etc
stored in a CRM system, Invoices, taxation information stored in a Billing system,
Inventory, Vendor management, stored in an ERP system, etc.
Unstructured Data
Information assets such as documents, plans, designs, project conversations,
communication (internal and external), Notes, Research, Data Sheets, Proposals,
and more.

By 2025, IDG projects
that there will be 163
zettabytes of data in the
world, and estimates
indicate that 80% of this
data is unstructured.

With data as the new oil, companies have to:
Control Access
to the
data/information
assets
Plan and Execute
Information
Security for
Information assets
Organise, Preserve
and provide easy
access to
information assets

Structured data
is typically centralised,
and based on
databases, making
preservation natural
and easy.
Unstructured data
is typically fragmented,
distributed, uneven and
spread across Internal and
External file sharing and
synchronisation systems

Collating, Organising, Classifying,
Preserving and Accessing unstructured
data is a nightmare.
(Many times the organisation is unaware of the depth of
assets created across their employees. These are invisible,
unmapped and unavailable centrally when required)

But in todays scenario,
preserving data in an
easily accessible form is
not just mandatory for
regulation compliance,
knowledge
management, forensic
analysis and legal
responses
also a source of
competitive
advantage due to the
ability to reuse
knowledge from the
corporate archive.
BUT

The most popular and
deeply entrenched means
of sharing information
internally and externally is
via email.
Enter Email

60%
of business-critical
information is
stored exclusively
in email
- IDC
4GB
is the average
annual growth in a
user's archive
account
- Mithi
126
messages are expected
to be sent and received,
on average, per business
user per day, by the end
of 2019
- Radicati

The total number of emails sent and received per
day is forecasted to reach 306 Billion by 2020
- Radicati

70% of all emails carry business critical data
and Information assets
-IDG

So a key component of an organisation's
data management strategy has to be to
ensure that all email are preserved
and accessible on demand.
In this webinar we focus our discussion to strategies
for managing email data.

Common data management
methods deployed today and
their drawbacks

Data generated by employees are information
assets belonging to the company and need to
be preserved, managed on an ongoing basis in
an Enterprise Information Architecture

• Focus mainly on capturing the
laptop when an employee
leaves (assuming it has all the
information)
• Treat data archival of an exiting
employee as a post mortem
process
• Allow the use of public file
sharing and synchronisation
tools (such as Gdrive, DropBox, etc)
Common
mistakes made
by many
organisations

• The fragmented nature of Information assets
makes it difficult to locate and collate after the
employee has gone
• The data is open to tampering or theft just
before an employee leaves
• Information assets saved on consumer file
sharing apps like GDrive, OneDrive, dropbox etc
may not be accessible to your organisation.
• Information assets could have been transported
outside your network via email
Post mortem approach - Risky

Which of these strategies is your organization currently
deploying to manage email data? (Select all that apply)
Poll
1. Capturing snapshot backups of end points, periodically
2. Deploying Quota limits on email accounts
3. Many to one Email Journaling/Forwarding
4. Periodically moving old email data to PSTs
5. Other methods

Whether In Premise or on Cloud,
What are some of the popular methods of
email data management used Today?

Pre-requisite
• You need to invest in a robust, scalable email backup solution
• You need to invest in additional storage and tapes to keep
backups
• You need to invest in a multi site backup architecture with tapes,
to maintain off site backups.
Outcomes - Investment with poor ROI
• Mail activity between backups is not captured
• Not compliance ready - No guarantee that ALL email have been
captured in the backups
• Not Search or Restore ready - Searching and restoring an email
by content, meta data from backups is a challenge
• Keeping the backup storage and tapes, safe, secure and reliable
is a challenge
• Can at best recover to a point in time state of the mailbox or
server
• IT Team occupied with a low yield activity.
• Users cannot help themselves restore their own mail typically.
Capturing snap shot
backups of end
points, periodically

Process
• Users & IT teams spend a lot of time cleaning mailboxes to
contain storage bloat and compute overload
• Users are forced to delete even important/critical email to
maintain their mailbox within limits
• Many organisations expect users to download their email locally
(PST files) and then clean them from their mailboxes
• Most users set an "auto forward" to their personal Gmail accounts
to maintain backups
Outcomes - End point Jungle with splintered data
• Productivity loss with choosing, downloading and deleting email
• Potential mail loss risk with locally stored critical data
• Privacy risk with mail diverted to an inaccessible external email id.
• No single point control, ownership and consolidated view of all
email for the organisation since the data is all splintered across
end points.
Deploying Quota
limits on email
accounts to control
mailbox bloat and cost

Process
• Journal a copy of every mail sent/received to a central, single
journal email id (typically another mailbox on same system)
• Configures a desktop email client to POP mail from this journal
email ID into a local PC to create PST files/EML files.
• Backup the PST files to a secondary storage & rotate regularly
Outcomes
• A Security tick mark - No practical use of this data in compliance
and knowledge discovery use cases.
• Notional data safety - Safety, Security and Reliability of the PST files
on the local PC is another challenge
• Not search ready - Data of all users mixed up in one account,
splintered across PST files, making it challenging to locate and
download selected data
• Not recovery ready - Collating and restoring mailboxes from
splintered PST files, can be a hairball and time consuming
Many to one Email
Journaling, coupled
with download to a
client PC
Data Management Strategy: Many to One Email Journaling

Process
• Configure MS Outlook, Thunderbird to automatically move
mail older than a date to a local store
• This mail is also removed from the server mailbox.
Outcomes
• For a business, this method means loss of control on the mail
data
• A business cannot easily access discover in these files
distributed across client devices (possibly across geographies)
• Keeping these archive files safe, secure and reliable is a
challenge
Email Client Archival
to move old email
data to PSTs

After an employee leaves, organizations
are doing one or more of the following
1. Deleting the email (and the knowledge in it) since
there is no way to maintain these email
2. Disabling the account but retaining the mailbox in a
suspended state (and paying for this)
3. Downloading email from the account as PST/EML
files, storing locally, and deleting the account from
the primary mailbox.
4. Retaining the end point backups of the mailboxes
from the client devices
Typically the local
PST/EML file sets or
end point backups are
retained for the long
term on external
disks, tapes.

3 Simple Strategies
to manage
unstructured data

Strategy 1:
For Documents, Files

Employees continue to use
consumer online file-sharing
tools for sensitive
documents, even when their
company has banned the
use of such tools.
Challenges for managing Documents and Files
However, this means that
ECM program managers
have no control over
content and sometimes
don't even know that
employees are using
these tools
Using such tools also
enables them to collaborate
with their business
partners, such as
contractors, temporary staff
and contacts in other
companies.

• Introduce EFSS tools (Enterprise File sharing and
Synchronisation) as the preferred (mandatory)
method to share files with colleagues, partners
and customers.
• Help users transition from using public tools to
internal EFSS tools
Recommendations

Enterprises that invest wisely in EFSS capabilities will enable a more
collaborative workplace with easy information sharing, while
reducing or avoiding the security and compliance threats associated
with using "consumer" cloud services.
They'll also benefit from increased workforce productivity, reduced
email traffic/size and reduced costs.
Outcomes

Live Case Study –
How we do it at Mithi
Reduction of internal email traffic by over 80%, reduced Data Risk
and improved team productivity by over 300%

Top Benefits of using an EFSS tool
(like Ideolve)
• All information assets generated by anybody within the organisation
are available in a central organisation level store
• Conversations for each information asset all stored and tracked with
the Information Asset (IA)
• Version tracking of Information Assets
• IAs are captured, organised and maintained on an ongoing basis and
not collected after the fact from devices of former employees
• When an employee leaves, simply transfer ownership of all IAs with
the successor

Strategy 2:
For Legacy Email

Whenever you start your Data Migration journey, you
will have some legacy email data, most of which carries
business critical data, to be preserved and accessible
for reuse, during litigations and audits.

Legacy email
is typically
lying around
In the active mailboxes of
users
Downloaded in the desktop
email clients of users
Downloaded in PST/EML files
on drives, tapes and other
storage mediums

Risk fraught
approach
- Keeps the doors open for tampering
- High chance of data theft, loss or
corruption
- Difficult to manage and maintain
offline storage devices

Store the email data in raw native file formats on some safe
cloud store.
• These email are not discoverable directly from the store
• A cataloging mechanism must be devised and maintained to
for the mail data of each user
Outcomes
• Safe, Elastic, Secure data store
• Central, controlled repository
• Search and Retrieve data on-demand (albeit not instantly)
Recommendation for Infrequent access
1

Recommendation for Infrequent access

2 Store the email data in an online, search ready format on the
cloud
• Upload/Import historical data directly from the live mailbox of
the employee
• Upload/Import historical data from PST/EML/MBOX files.
Outcomes
• Safe, Elastic, Secure and indexed data store
• Central, controlled repository
• Data is automatically indexed, search ready and ready for
export on demand.
Recommendation for Frequent access

Recommendation 2 for Frequent access

Active
Employee
Live mail
archiving
Employee
leaves
Shift plan
to HOLD
Hold for life or
sunset as required
Active
Employee
Employee
leaves
Migrate data from
mailbox to HOLD
Delete primary
mailbox
Hold for life or
sunset as required
Hold for life or
sunset as required
Dump Legacy
data in PST/EML
Import data
into HOLD
3 simple processes to manage the entire legacy data life cycle from
creation to destruction
Active
Employee
Employee
leaves

Live Case Study – How a leading Financial services
company saves on Gsuite costs & stays
compliance ready.
Challenge
• Rapid attrition and onboarding of employees
• Data of ex-employees needs preservation
• Keeping account disabled on Gsuite costly
Solution
• As employee leaves, migrate email to a cloud cold store
• Delete user account from Gsuite to optimize costs
Outcomes
• Safe secure cloud data store, resulting in 70% cost saving
Over a year the
company has
preserved data
of 700 ex-
employees on
the cloud
totalling about
20TB and saved
over 200K USD
annually on
Gsuite licenses

Strategy 3:
Hierarchical Storage

A Hierarchical storage architecture,
combines two solutions:
• Your primary solution and
• A cloud archival solution.

A Hierarchical storage architecture, splits the
mailbox of a user into two:
• One a live mail store on the primary mail
solution retaining mail only for a small
period and
• Two a archive mail store on a cloud
archiving platform, having all the mail
retained for the long term
What is a Hierarchical Storage Architecture?

Here’s how it works

Top Benefits of using a Hierarchical Storage
Architecture
• Leaner, higher performing primary mailboxes
• Better storage management on on-premise mail solutions
• All data captured and safe
• A central repository to prevent data loss, set up automatic governance
rules and enable multiple levels of access based on the user's role in the
organization.
• Automatically the organisation is better equipped for compliance,
audits, knowledge sharing and successor management
• When an employee leaves, simply transfer ownership of the Vault to the
successor

Live Case Study – How a Micro Finance company
preserved investment on MS Exchange & Secured
the Data
Challenge
• Rapidly filling mailboxes on MS Exchange
• Degrading server performance and user access
• Expensive upgrade path
Solution
• Secure a copy of all data on the cloud, in flight
• Apply a retention policy on primary mailboxes to lean them
Outcomes
An improved
performance
on the legacy MS
Exchange server,
along with data
security, safety
and improved
compliance
posture

Key
Takeaways

81% organizations
are opting for SaaS cloud solutions
to drive their workloads & gain from
SLA backed guarantees.
81%

• A proactive strategy to capture
information as it is generated will be
superior to looking for all the
information once the employee leaves.
• An enterprise information architecture
and structure is critical to have in place.
• Managing unstructured data is the
major chunk of your data management
initiative
• Preserving all Email is a critical path in
your data management journey
• Store data on a SaaS cloud email archival
platform for improved reliability,
durability, security and life cycle
management of the data.
• Store legacy email in raw file formats on
a cloud store if there no frequent
requirement to discover or recover
individual emails.
• Archive all email, in flight, to get a grip
on 70% of your business critical
information
• Use EFSS tools and discourage consumer
cloud based file sharing apps

The Mithi
Advantage
Serving demanding Enterprise customers
for nearly 2 decades

• I need an email system on my own brand, which is business class, reliable,
guaranteed, and secure
• I want to Optimize email solution costs on O365, Gsuite with a hybrid email
setup
• Email is a poor tool for collaboration and sharing documents, with duplication,
splintering and bloating mailboxes. I want a secure, private, corporate EFSS
tool to share files with colleagues, customers and partners
• I want to optimize storage and performance on my primary mail
server/solution
Flexible, Secure, Scalable Cloud Email and Team
Collaboration platform to help you improve Digital
Dexterity In your work place
Communication
& Collaboration

• I am finding it difficult to secure, and locate fragmented information when needed.
I want to improve our organisation's compliance posture and be audit ready at all times?
• I am using a legacy mail platform like Exchange and am running out of storage,
hitting performance bottlenecks, running a data loss risk and finding data is a
pain.
• I want to reduce risks of vendor lock in when using one of the big cloud email
solutions like O365 or Gsuite.
• I have migrated to a cloud solution like O365/Gsuite but I need to preserve my legacy
email data in a search ready form without incurring heavy costs.
• I am changing my mail solution provider and need help to migrate my email data
between the solutions.
• I want to selectively retrieve email data from my primary mail platform (Exchange, O365,
Gsuite, Zimbra…etc) or Vaultastic accounts for multiple users
• I use GSuite or O365 and have a lot of employee churn. I need to preserve data of exit
employees by policy and keeping it on GSuite/O365 is an expensive affair.
Data
Management
Cloud Data Management - Simplified

• I am using an on-premise Exchange, Zimbra, or other mail server and am
concerned about the safety and security of my data, which is fragmented
across user accounts and multiple end points.
• I am using an on-premise Exchange, Zimbra, or other mail server and am
facing problems related to spam, viruses, ransomware, etc
• I am using an on-premise Exchange, Zimbra, or other mail server but am
concerned about business continuity since I don’t have redundancies
or a DR Site.
Email security, continuity and durability solutions
for your Email Setup
Security

BUILDING BLOCKS FOR
OUR SOLUTIONS
vaultastic .mithi.com
Secure Email
Archiving Solutions
for Compliance,
Ediscovery & Backup
Automation
Skyconnect.mithi.com
Secure, Dependable,
Scalable Email for
Business
Communications
ideolve.mithi.com
Uncomplicate your
Team Collaboration.
Get more done.
Guaranteed Email
Security & Disaster
Recovery for
Uninterrupted
Business.
Clrstream.mithi.com Legacyflo.mithi.com
Email Data
Migration made
easy. Automatic,
Reliable, Handsfree

Trust & compliance support
Well
architected
for
Regular
Independent
Security &
VAPT audits

Connectors for vaultastic -

Availability
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Over 50 active resellers
DISTRIBUTORS SYSTEM INTEGRATORS

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