http://www.mimosasystems.com/html/news-pr-mimosa-systems-acquired-by-iron-mountain-02-22-10.htm

Iron Mountain Adds All-in-One, On-Premises Archive to Complement its Cloud Offerings; Company Now Capable of Managing Information Wherever it Resides

BOSTON (Feb. 22, 2010) – Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), an information management services company, today announced it has acquired Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa Systems, Inc., a leader in enterprise-class content archiving solutions, for approximately $112 million in cash, subject to closing adjustments. The deal provides Iron Mountain with an integrated archive for email, SharePoint data and files, and gives the company an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives.

The ability to archive and manage data both onsite, inside the customer’s firewall, and remotely in the cloud makes Iron Mountain a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management. It also provides the company’s customers with greater flexibility and choice for managing their information.

Additionally, the company can now capture and manage a broader range of enterprise information from so-called “edge-of-the-network” devices like desktop PCs and laptops as well as from company repositories like email stores, SharePoint servers and file systems. Many larger businesses still prefer to keep this data on their premises today. Finally, the acquisition allows Iron Mountain to extract intelligence from the information it manages both on-premises and in the cloud, advancing the company’s larger strategy to help enterprises lower the costs and risks associated with storing and managing information.

“We’re really excited about adding Mimosa Systems,” said Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain. “We acquired Mimosa because we believe it offers the best archiving technology on the market, and the company shares our philosophy to help customers reduce the cost and risk of storing and managing information. By combining Mimosa’s on-premises archive with our cloud-based technologies, Iron Mountain can now store, recover and discover digital content wherever it resides. This is a great example of the type of technology acquisition that fits well within our long-term growth strategy.”

Mimosa NearPoint™ is an enterprise archiving platform with applications for retention and disposition, eDiscovery, compliance supervision, classification, recovery, and end-user search, enabling customers to reduce risk, and lower their eDiscovery and storage costs. Mimosa has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and is recognized by industry analysts as a fast-growing, visionary archiving company.

“Enterprises today are buried in email and other forms of user-generated content, making information storage and management a complex, expensive and risky exercise,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group. “This deal strengthens Iron Mountain’s position in the market as a comprehensive provider of information management solutions. Its customers now have greater flexibility to store and manage their information onsite or in the cloud, where it makes sense for their budget and business.”

NearPoint joins a broad portfolio of content archiving, data protection and recovery, and eDiscovery solutions from Iron Mountain Digital. Customers wanting to archive email can now choose either NearPoint for onsite archiving or Iron Mountain’s Total Email Management Suite, powered by Mimecast® technology, for archiving email in the cloud. Additionally, customers can use Iron Mountain’s Digital Record Center® for Compliant Messaging for email that must meet SEC regulations and supervision.

The addition of the NearPoint content archive also offers customers an enhanced eDiscovery solution set for quickly finding content and applying legal holds across email, file and SharePoint data. For larger litigation matters, organizations can easily transfer their onsite data to Iron Mountain’s cloud solution, Stratify Legal Discovery® Service. For smaller matters or in instances where companies want to begin the eDiscovery process on their own, they can do so onsite with Iron Mountain’s early-case assessment tool for eDiscovery, eVantage™.

The Mimosa team will be retained and become an integral part of Iron Mountain Digital. The president and CEO of Mimosa Systems, T. M. Ravi, will assume the role of chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital, responsible for all marketing functions and helping to drive strategy planning and execution for Iron Mountain Digital.

“It’s a win-win situation for our customers and partners who can now leverage Iron Mountain’s global reach and comprehensive information management services,” said T.M. Ravi. “The Mimosa team will play a key role in the development and execution of the company’s cloud and on-premises information management strategy.”

About Mimosa
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation email, file and SharePoint archiving solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa NearPoint is the industry’s most comprehensive unstructured information management software solution for email, files, collaboration systems and instant messages, enabling archiving, eDiscovery, storage management, and recovery in a unified solution. Mimosa is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recognized for its competencies in networking infrastructure solutions, ISV/software solutions, and advanced infrastructure solutions.

About Iron Mountain Digital
Iron Mountain Digital is the world’s leading provider of information management services for data protection and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery and intellectual property management. The technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to thousands of companies around the world, directly and through a worldwide network of channel partners. Iron Mountain Digital is based in Southborough, Mass.

About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The Company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions, along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain is a trusted partner to more than 140,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit the Company’s Web site at www.ironmountain.com.

OK .. so Exchange 2010 will be  available to the general public coming November 9th and as I mentioned in an earlier post it is the archiving capabilities that a lot of people are looking at.  I’ve spend now quite some time to look over the functionality and am going to write a set of posts with items that you need to be aware of. Today I’d like to bring retention to your attention.  Retention in Exchange Server 2010 is accomplished with multiple retention options.  These policies can then be configured with actions on how to maintain and move data from the primary mailbox to the archive:

The first part is the Retention Policy Tag (RPT) which applies retention settings to the default folders (Inbox, Deleted Items and Sent Items) in a mailbox and all items that are in these default folders inherit this  folders policy tag.  Once a tag is applied to these folders, users are not able to change the tag, however they can apply a different tag to individual items in one of the default folders.  Now here is the catch, as you can create RPTs for the following default folders:

• DeletedItems
• Drafts
• Inbox
• JunkMail
• Outbox
• SentItems
• RssSubscriptions
• SyncIssues
• ConversationHistory

But retention Policy Tags are not supported for the Calendar, Journal, Notes and Tasks folders which means that you cannot set retention on all of the data in the users mailbox.

Remember this article that I wrote? It doesn’t seem that hackers need to try to get to your information when its in the all praised buzzword SaaS cloud. Techcrunch reports that even the almighty Google can mess up and had private documents shared without permissions.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/huge-google-privacy-blunder-shares-your-docs-without-permission/

There are a LOT of reasons why I don’t like Software As A Service (SaaS) for some mission critical applications. The biggest one is giving up control of your data! I don’t like having potentially sensitive client documents and work product in the hands of unknown parties. “Oh, but it’s Google, it’s safe!” Sure.

As the article above explains, even Google can sometimes mess up and compromise your documents. How about if it was a strategy memo for a client that ended up in the hands of opposing counsel? Potentially nasty? You betcha. Can you imagine the headlines when a hosted archive vendor was running both Merck and Pfizer and their information was freely shared amongst the users of the archives?

And do you know who has keys to your server room at your office? I’m sure you do - you can probably count those people on one hand; you may even eat lunch with them on a regular basis. Do you know who has the keys to Google’s server room? No. And you can say that about just about any online provider - you just don’t know who has access to those servers and that means you don’t know who has access to your documents.

That worries me. And if you handle confidential client work-product then it should worry you too.

Source:  http://www.macworld.com/article/137017/emailpolicy.html

Apple has sold enterprise-class storage hardware and software for years, but the company has yet to embrace systematic e-mail and document retention policies that are common among publicly traded companies.

According to a recent legal filing (page 7) in the Psystar vs Apple antitrust case, Apple employees are responsible for maintaining their own documents such as e-mails, memos, and voicemails. In other words, there is no company-wide policy for archiving, saving, or deleting these documents

This could pose a problem in the event of a lawsuit. In recent years, companies have been fined millions after failing to retrieve old emails and other files required as evidence. The fear of fines and other sanctions has resulted in many companies instituting strict “e-discovery” retention policies, and has helped give rise to a new class of enterprise-class storage and indexing tools.

An e-discovery lawyer, who asked not to be named because his employer (a firm you probably have heard of) doesn’t want him speaking to the press, explained the basic legal requirements surrounding email and document retention to The Standard. “If litigation is anticipated, the party has a duty to preserve potentially relevant documents,” he said.

“An employee retention program with no organization or coordination is effectively incapable of compliance,” he continued, “barring an act of God, or luck akin to picking every game right in an NCAA pool. Apple’s retention policy is negligent.”

Consider this scenario: Employees could have e-mails from five years ago that become “potentially relevant”, but because there was no policy in place regarding e-documents, those records could easily become destroyed—making it potentially impossible for a plaintiff to make a case from internal documents.

However, Apple claims in the Psystar document that its policy is fine because once the company anticipated litigation:

[Apple] identified a group of employees who could potentially have documents relevant to the issues reasonably evident in this action. Apple then provided those individuals with a document retention notice which included a request for the retention of any relevant documents.

Psystar’s antitrust claim has been dismissed, but Apple is currently involved in many other cases. Apple’s weak e-discovery practices could very well come back to haunt the company.

If you’re interested in learning more about e-discovery, the relevant court case for e-document retention is Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC. LexisNexis gives a nice overview of what is legally required from a corporation.

For even more information, The Sedona Conference recently issued a series of guidelines which, while not legally required, are a good “best practices” guide to document preservation.

Yesterday Autonomy closed their Ottawa office and released all of the employees there excluding some sales staff. This means that none of the original Educom development team who wrote the EAS product are now left. The exact reason behind this closure is still unknown, but letting go of development staff generally means that there is a lesser focus on that product.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/20/AR2008082002617.html?hpid=moreheadlines

WASHINGTON — The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.

The nine-page outline of the White House’s e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.

The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors’ proposals, which was dated June 20.

Last week, the White House declined to comment on the document.

On Wednesday, the White House refused to talk about internal White House contracting procedures, but said the information is “outdated and seriously inaccurate.” It would not elaborate. The White House also declined to say whether it has hired a contractor for the work yet.

“With an eye on the clock, the White House continues to drag its feet and do everything possible to postpone public access to the records of this presidency,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private watchdog group.

The draft document outlines a process in which private contractors would attempt to retrieve lost e-mail from 35,000 disaster recovery backup tapes dating back to October 2003, a period covering such events as growing violence in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the criminal probe into the disclosure that Valerie Plame had worked for the CIA.

The recovery project would not use backup tapes going back to March 2003, according to the draft document, even though an earlier White House assessment suggested e-mails were missing from that period as well.

Industry experts point out that relying on the backup system to ensure accurate retention, preservation and retrieval of all e-mails is problematic because it does not take into account deleted e-mails.

“A backup system isn’t designed to be a 100 percent complete inventory of all e-mails,” says William P. Lyons, chairman and chief executive of AXS-One, a provider of records compliance management solutions.

“It’s designed to make a copy of data at a specific point-in-time,” said Lyons. “Data is backed up on a daily, weekly and monthly basis as part of a disaster recovery strategy, to ensure to protect the organization from data loss.”

The White House draft document says that the number of days of missing e-mail ranges from 25 to 225, a range that industry experts say would make it difficult to bid on a recovery project.

“Generally, when the scope of the work is expected to fluctuate by a factor of nearly ten, I can only take you so seriously,” said Steve Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement program at George Washington University.

“Contractors cannot accurately plan for or staff based on such an estimate,” said Schooner.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in February, the White House told Congress it was trying to determine how many e-mails were missing. An earlier analysis from 2005 estimated the number of days of missing e-mails at 473 over a period of 20 months.

While the higher number would appear to suggest the White House has found a large amount of previously missing e-mail, that may not necessarily be the case. Industry experts say it is unclear from the brief description in the draft document whether the missing-day measurements in that document and those in the earlier analysis can be compared.

“We will continue to work with members of Congress and the National Archives and will communicate the results of our accounting effort at an appropriate time,” White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has said the White House’s failure to properly archive e-mails violated the Presidential Records Act. The top lawyer for the National Archives has expressed disappointment the White House did not have a formal records management system in place.

On Wednesday, House Democratic Caucus chairman Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois criticized how the problem has been handled, saying, “The White House that wants to keep track of all your e-mail and phone records can’t even keep track of their own.”

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/19/judge-hands-white-house THE WHITE HOUSE was ordered by a federal judge yesterday to show just cause within three days why it should not be required to produce to the court forensic copies of all its data storage media used by any employee between March 2003 and October 2005.

Public interest groups sued to obtain White House emails from that period but the Bush administration claims it “lost” all those emails and can’t recover them.

In 2002 the Bush administration dismantled the Lotus Notes based Automatic Records Management System that the Clinton administration had installed in 1994. Between 2002 and 2004, the White House migrated to an email system based on Microsoft Exchange, according to testimony last month before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by Theresa Payton, CIO for the White House Office of Administration. She testified that the Lotus Notes based email archiving system did not work properly with Microsoft Exchange.

We can almost see Karl Rove slapping his forehead and laughing, “Who knew?”

Consequently, potentially millions of White House emails generated just before and after the start of the Iraq war, as well as during the period when covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover was blown, have been discovered as missing.

The Bush administration has offered varying and conflicting stories about the “lost” White House e-mails. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said last April, “I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost.”

Two citizens watchdog groups, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, are pursuing a federal lawsuit against the administration to force disclosure of the missing e-mails and installation of effective email archiving at the White House.

Yesterday’s ruling by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola gives the White House three days to “show cause in writing … why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a forensic copy of any media that has been used or is being used by any former or current employee who was employed at any time between March 2003 and October 2005.”

A “forensic copy” means an exact duplicate of a physical data storage device.

The White House has until the close of business on this Friday, March 21st to respond to the judge’s order.

I’m not going to discuss the whole reasoning why former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer had to resign, however the archiving industry basically owes its massive growth largely to him. We should all remember Mr. Spitzer’s contribution to the email archiving industry as during his eight year tenure as Attorney General, Mr. Spitzer took on the giants of Wall Street - Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and the New York Stock Exchange in cases involving white collar crime, securities crime and internet fraud. Along the way much was said about the mis-management of email records, resulting in many judicial changes to management of email and all forms of electronic records.

Time will tell if Eliott Spitzer resumes a public career or retires to a more private life, but we owe a debt of gratitude for the man who almost single handedly brought attention to email and other forms of electronic communication and brought about the changes we take for granted today.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/03/messagegate.html

E-mail governance might not be the sexiest thing when it comes to content technologies, but don’t tell that to your CIO or general counsel. Besides keeping them out of jail, a solid e-mail governance strategy drives compliance, improves information retrieval, and reduces paper.

A company that’s trying to fight that good fight when it comes to e-mail governance is MessageGate.

MessageGate has made a name for itself helping some very large companies govern the chaotic world of e-mail. It has some pretty good bloodlines, too, taking what it learned at Boeing and breaking away to target enterprise customers in 2003. According to marketing chief Chris Bradley, MessageGate is approaching profitability and ramping up its sales and marketing efforts to target more clients like current customers Lehman Brothers and Lockheed.

As enterprises push their processes to eliminate paper and minimize warehouses full of stored documents, the percentage of e-mail that becomes business records is increasing. Some people call this a move toward environmental friendliness or green IT, others see it as an area to gain efficiencies and increase productivity. Either way, large increases in e-mail volume clearly create challenges relative to content management, compliance, and security.

“The cost of compliance is rapidly rising, and ad-hoc efforts to address compliance haven’t really succeeded,” said Bradley.

And apparently some of ECM’s bigger names have figured out it’s easier to partner with companies like MessageGate.

“The ECM vendors can’t take their document management engine and subsume a full-blown e-mail archiving solution,” added Bradley.

“The ECM angle for us is an interesting dynamic. We’re working with several of the large ECM providers to help their customers get on a better footing when it comes to how they view and manage their e-mail infrastructure. EMC (NYSE: EMC), in particular, has its own formidable e-mail archiving solution, but they still also work with our platform,” noted Bradley.

Risk management is obviously critical for all enterprise customers, and it still surprises me that e-mail governance is sometimes viewed as content management’s stepchild.

“Rather than keep your head in the sand,” concluded Bradley, “companies need to start applying policies and prepare for the inevitable.”

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/03/10/229785/confidence-ebbs-in-email-archiving.htm

A survey by AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Association, has found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of UK respondents have little or no confidence that their firms’ emails related to commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and recoverable.

This figure represents a continuing decline in confidence in email traceability: in the same survey in 2007, 56% expressed their lack of confidence. In general public sector organizations, the lack of confidence rose to over 70%.

AIIM ventured the opinion that the research also reflected a general lack of control over all non-paper records, with 51% not confident that their electronic information is accurate, accessible and trustworthy, a rise of 7% compared to twelve months earlier.  When asked, “If your organisation was sued by a former customer or citizen, how long would it take to produce all of the information related to that person?”, just  over a quarter of respondents (27%) cited more than one month.

The results are indicative that investment in document and email management systems is failing to keep pace with the email deluge explained Doug Miles, AIIM’s UK Managing Director. He commented, “It also suggests that recent high profile cases may have alerted organizations to their potential vulnerabilities. For larger organizations, savings in legal discovery costs alone could justify an ECM investment.”

AIIM hopes to address these issues at its 2008 AIIM Roadshow,  which visits Glasgow, Bolton, Coventry, Bristol and London from 28 April to 2 May. This year’s educational theme is “Piecing together the Information Puzzle” and industry experts will deliver information and advice throughout the week.