Davenport University
Ensuring Secure and Compliant Email
Davenport University ensures its collaboration system is secure and compliant thanks to Messaging Architects’ email risk management platform
Executive Summary
Davenport University is a private, non-profit university based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that offers a practical curriculum and the latest programs for in-demand careers in business, technology and health professions. For a few years now, they have been using Messaging Architects’ software to protect their collaboration environment and mitigate the risks of legal discovery.
Background
Davenport University aspires to be a world-class business school that excels in career preparation, career advancement, and professional development. With its distinguished reputation for mentoring and practical learning, Davenport teaches students to think creatively and recognize opportunity in a dynamic economy, as well as instills in them an appreciation for civic responsibility in the communities where they live and work. Today, the university has about 12,000 students and 3,050 employees comprising the faculty and staff. For their collaboration needs, Davenport University uses Novell GroupWise. To maximize the investment in their email infrastructure, they use the Messaging Architects Security and Compliance Suite to ensure the employees are able to best service the students in a secure messaging environment and the institution is compliant with respect to access to information requests, as well as able to provide data quickly and easily in the case of legal discovery or internal audits.
Using Guardian Technology for Optimal Spam Protection
Since 2001, Davenport University has been using the Guardian anti-spam technology. At that time, they switched to the Messaging Architects’ solution from another product that was way too restrictive in its ability to control spam filtering.
Steven Tharp, Novell Server Manager at Davenport, talks about the circumstances that made the switch mandatory. “At Davenport there is an interesting dichotomy with respect to the end users of the email system. On the one hand, we have the enrollment staff that needs to be guaranteed that not a single false positive gets trapped. This is a very real problem: we are a private university and we actively pursue new registrations. Typically, the inquiries from potential students come from free email accounts that carry banners and all types of ads appended to them. Many spam filtering solutions trap such emails, erroneously taking them for spam. However, for our enrollment staff such lost emails translate into lost revenue. On the other hand, the administrative staff is on the opposite end of the spectrum. They hate spam and they can’t be bothered by even a single message. They pretty much insist on draconian measures when it comes to trapping unwanted email. So we in the IT department are in the situation where we need to be able to allow messages that could be potential new student registration and at the same time not aggravate the administration by having the ability to provide very tight spam control where necessary. This is the flexibility that we are able to achieve with M+Guardian.”
Last year, Davenport University upgraded to the new Linux-based M+Guardian appliance. M+Guardian continues the fire-and-forget concept underlying Messaging Architects’ Guardian technology designed to help IT administrators eliminate spam from their email systems with minimum administration. The new appliance features an improved user web portal for real-time quarantine management by the respective users. This has reduced the overhead for the Help Desk staff who no longer need to deal with handling spam. The upgrade to M+Guardian has also allowed the Davenport University IT personnel to reduce the restrictions on attachment blocking, since the harmful files are caught by other filters in the scanning engines. “In fact, we’re doing very little blocking. From an administrative perspective, there’s very little overhead. The product just works. The time when we upgraded coincided with the need to replace old hardware. Putting the M+Guardian appliance in production saved us quite a bit of money that we were able to reallocate elsewhere. Currently, we have 2 M+Guardian appliances running in a clustered environment and we’re planning to expand to 4 for better redundancy. The dashboards provide useful statistics about email traffic in our system and the amount of spam blocked by M+Guardian. The end users are happy with the flexibility we’ve offered them and we’re happy with the fact that it’s a completely self-managed solution,” continues Tharp.
For Tharp, what’s most valuable in M+Guardian is the combination of the Guardian technology, running on Linux, and centrally managed via eDirectory. “We’re getting the best of a lot of world.”
Mitigating the Risks of Email Retention and the Costs of Electronic Discovery with M+Archive
In July 2007, Davenport University deployed M+Archive in order to begin centralized retention of electronic records stored in their email system. Two primary factors were at the core of this decision: concerns about records retention from a legal perspective and internal requests for electronic discovery. With the recent changes in federal and state regulations regarding what constitutes a record to include email messages, Davenport University consulted with attorneys as to their level of compliance. Following an audit and a discussion in which all relevant departments - IT, Legal, HR - had a say and highlighted their needs, the decision was made to design and deploy an email policy, which was made public to all faculty staff. According to this policy, the university retains 100% of all email in the institution’s email system for a period of two years, after which it is automatically purged.
According to Tharp, “Even though as a private university the requirements for retention we face aren’t as stringent as in the case of public institutions, we wanted to tackle the problem proactively. It was clear that we could do more to preserve email in a centralized and automated way and we decided to go ahead and roll out M+Archive. Through it, we were able to apply the necessary retention policies and automate the archiving process. We switched off the native GroupWise archiving and thus we are certain that all email is retained in our archive without any end-user intervention. I know that legally we’re in a much better position than we were before.”
The second driver for the M+Archive implementation had to do with improving the productivity of the IT staff in cases of internal eDiscovery. Tharp explains the situation before M+Archive, “Continuously, I would receive requests from HR requesting information on employees, both past and current. The retrieval process was very lengthy and time-consuming, as most of the time I needed to recreate the email system and eDirectory in a separate environment using back-up tapes. Then, I had to go through an extremely long step-by-step procedure to recover a single email, and most of the time the request was for more than one email. It used to take me up to 40 hours for each request - in other words, I would spend the entire week retrieving email. This wasn’t a good situation from a productivity point of view.”
The deployment of the archiving solution now allows Tharp and his colleagues to search and produce information requested by the Davenport University HR Department in a matter of minutes rather than days and does not entail the rebuilding of entire Post Offices.
“Overall, we are very pleased with the solution we selected as it has solved both problems we were faced with - we are protected from a legal perspective and we are able to fulfill discovery requests very quickly and easily,” concludes Tharp.
