Despite the tougher outlook for regulatory audits in the coming months, many advisory firms that host their own e-mail systems still lack an e-mail archiving and backup system (44% of advisers who responded to an
InvestmentNews technology survey last year said they had no such system).
That's where the latest version of Symantec Corp.'s Enterprise Vault archiving solution, rolled out on Monday, comes in. Version 8.0 of the online hosted application adds a lot of features, but the one that's probably most noticeable for end users would be the direct drag-and-drop access to the archive from within Outlook. In the past, users relied on shortcut links from their mailbox to the archive.
Enterprise Vault starts at $34 per user per year, but scales up based on the number of features selected and the amount of data stored in gigabytes.
Though smaller firms typically outsource the setup and maintenance of these products to resellers of computer software or consultants, the Enterprise Vault provides features that a firm's management and compliance officers are required to oversee in-house.
For example it supports e-mail policy creation and enforcement, as well as e-discovery of information across multiple Microsoft applications including Exchange and SharePoint. It also supports file servers and instant messaging systems running within a Microsoft network.
Another feature available is referred to as “E-Discovery and Search with Guided Review.” Here, searches can be conducted and the results can be viewed based on clusters of data retained within the archive. The results can be marked and tagged by reviewers or according to rules created within the application's policy interface.
Another feature — Granular Legal Hold — might be useful in an audit. This allows an administrator to suspend the deletion of archived data in response to an internal investigation, litigation or regulatory request.
For end users, the Enterprise Vault allows for combined access to both live and archived e-mails from within Outlook — without any visible change to the appearance of the messages (or archived stub files).
This new capability allows end users to drag, search, move and retrieve archived e-mail within Outlook. Additionally, Enterprise Vault supports previous versions of Exchange and is scheduled to provide fully integrated archiving support for Exchange 2010 early next year.
Competing offerings include
EMC Retrospect from EMC Corp. and
ARCserve Backup from CA Inc. (formerly known as Computer Associates).
Plenty of online alternatives
Advisers looking for ways to handle their e-mail archiving now have a number of options that are tailored specifically to meet their compliance and regulatory needs.
Among the adviser-specific tools are
Digital Info Security Co. Inc.,
Global Relay Communications Inc.,
LiveOffice LLC with its AdvisorMail solutions, and
Smarsh Inc.
At a minimum, the starting price for setup and a year's subscription for a single-person shop starts at around $450 and could go over $1,500, depending on the features chosen. Some broker-dealers offer these or similar services to advisers as well, some at a negotiated discount.
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010
For those advisory firms that continue to run their own networks with servers, PCs, etc., and are in need of backup, there are new versions of Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery that can be a second line of defense and recovery on Microsoft platforms — including Exchange 2010, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.
For advisers working on their budgets for next year, the Backup Exec System Recovery Server Edition is $795 for one server license, while the Backup Exec System Recovery Windows Small Business Server Edition is $495 per SBS server installation, and the Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition is $69 per PC.
A bundled package, what Symantec calls the Backup Exec System Recovery Starter Kit, includes five Server Edition licenses and 10 Desktop Edition licenses and costs $3,495.
Again, as with e-mail compliance, there are quite a few online backup offerings available as well.
A short — and by no means exhaustive — list of providers would include the following applications that have been around for a few years:
Carbonite from Carbonite Inc. (mostly for the very small office with just PCs or Macs to back up, with the most straightforward pricing of any provider at $54.95 per year per computer);
Connected Backup for PC and Mac from Iron Mountain (their
LiveVault service for backing up servers; a wide range of pricing based on monthly or yearly use and amount of data to be backed up),
MozyPro from Decho Corp. (PC licenses are $3.95 plus $0.50 per gigabyte per month; server licenses are $6.95 plus $0.50 per gigabyte per month).
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