Data Portability with M+Archive Seals the Deal for the Comptroller's Office of Maryland

Background
The Comptroller is one of five statewide elected officials in Maryland. Since the Comptroller's office was created in 1851, it has grown to an agency of 1,100 employees. With 12 branches throughout the state, the principal duty of this office is to collect taxes, which are used to fund state government programs.

Challenge
To achieve the appropriate contact between the agency and the Maryland taxpayers, the Comptroller's office of Maryland uses Novell's GroupWise as its collaboration system. All communication with the customers is handled through a special GroupWise account which is subject to the email retention and compliance requirements as dictated by state law. What is more, this account contains sensitive information that not only needs to be securely stored in our production environment, but must be easily duplicated and placed at an off-site location in conformity with our disaster recovery plan.

Solution
We wanted to make sure that the agency is adequately protected from the vulnerabilities of long-term data storage. In M+Archive, we found the solution that offers the features we need to ensure that the electronic communication between the Comptroller's office and the taxpayers is secure and compliant.

Our decision to go with M+Archive didn't require much soul-searching. The enhanced search capabilities of the product are fantastic. What made the deal was M+Archive's capability to meet our disaster recovery system requirements. M+Archive is able to make the media mobile: it allows us to make a copy of the necessary GroupWise account and then ship it to a secure location off-site. So far, we are thoroughly impressed with the product.

Keith Thompson, IT Systems Technical Specialist
Information Technology Division
Comptroller of Maryland