Overview
In 2007, The National Kidney Foundation (NKF) reorganized from an affiliate-based structure to a centralized organization. The shift has required the National Headquarters to assume most of the administrative responsibilities including finance, human resources, and information technology and allowed local volunteers and staff to focus on critical activities such as delivering programs and fund raising.
The Challenge
For Gary Green, Vice President of Information Technology for the National Kidney Foundation, rolling up IT for 32 state offices as well as staff working from home and on the road into his New York City-based IT operations raised several hurdles. "We faced an imminent storage problem as we brought the new remote users under the domain of the national organization's IT operations," said Green. "The addition of 140 users as well as all their email history to the NKF GroupWise Post Office would more than double email storage requirements."
The NKF also had staff who had never deleted anything from their mailboxes. "Some people have more than 35,000 emails in their accounts; many don't realize they have to delete messages from their sent folder," said Gary. "It's scary to support an email system requiring that much storage."
The Solution
Green considered setting up a server on premises with its own file compression for a five-figure investment. While this would improve GroupWise performance, the new server would still need to be backed up, so the storage issue would remain unsolved. Instead, he began looking for a hosted email archiving service. "When Sonian's cloud-based archiving service was brought to my attention, the cost per user and feature set made Sonian the best value for the price that we could find," Green said.
The NKF initially deployed Sonian to 35 people at New York headquarters. The test group included everyone in the tech division as well as a representative cross section of users from finance and communications. Everyone was set up with the same user interface and permissions in order to make email archiving "hands-free" for the IT department. "A big plus for us," said Green, "is that people can access their archive from anywhere, any time. They don't have to rely on being at the office or even at their own desk."
Over the past nine months, Sonian proved it could solve the NKF's storage problems. However, Green also wanted to replicate the GroupWise native archive experience within Sonian, and he has worked closely with Sonian to effect several changes. First, Sonian was able to maintain the GroupWise file archives within Sonian; second, although NKF users at first had to access Sonian via an external web address, Sonian subsequently integrated it in the GroupWise 8 client so that users can manage live mailboxes and archive through a single familiar interface.
"Sonian was very responsive to our requests," said Green. "The hierarchy is important because users wanted to go to the file that they knew, and we also don't want to rely on search 100% of the time. We've worked with Sonian on these issues over the last several months and now we are ready for prime time."
Benefits
Green and his IT staff will soon begin rolling out Sonian to all 360 mailboxes on their GroupWise Post Office. They'll start with the roughly 225 people at NYC headquarters, and then add the 140 remote state office users. Green is anticipating several benefits from the full Sonian implementation:
* Storage requirements reduced by 50%: With close to 400 gigabytes of data on the GroupWise mail server, NKF is estimating that by implementing Sonian and its new archiving policies, they will be able to halve their GroupWise storage needs.
* Scalability: Sonian allows NKF to store any user's email for any period of time regardless of size.
* Ease of use: NKF has actively participated in the evolution of Sonian's Web interface as well as the addition of folders to the navigation bar on the left.
* Ease of deployment: The NKF will move new mailboxes onto Sonian on a daily basis. Once a user has been moved to Sonian, they'll drop an icon on their desktop and direct them to a self-explanatory video on their network. The ease of the Sonian Web interface is such that nothing more is needed.
* Compliance: Green is confident that should he need to report to a governing regulatory body, he will be easily able to do so with Sonian.
"Once everything is on Sonian, we will introduce new archiving policies. After nine months, emails will automatically be moved onto the Sonian archive and erased from the GroupWise Post Office," said Green. "Storage needs will decrease dramatically, and the GroupWise platform will be quicker. Our remote users across the country will see a big performance improvement too. Instead of pulling an entire GroupWise thread of emails every time they sign on, they'll connect directly to Sonian in the cloud. This will significantly speed up access to their archived messages."
About Sonian
Sonian is the trusted cloud-powered universal data management company, which delivers archiving/storage, e-discovery and compliance services. Global organizations rely on Sonian for its affordability, security, ease of deployment and use. Founded in 2006, Sonian supports thousands of customers on all major enterprise collaboration solutions including Exchange, Notes, GroupWise, Zimbra and others; and enjoys strategic partnerships with industry leaders Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Mindshift, Axway
30 Minute Webinar:
Cloud Power: Hosted Archiving for GroupWise
November 4, 2009; 2pm, Eastern
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/133749913