Somerfield stops email flood with archiving

Supermarket chain Somerfield is rolling out an email archiving system for individual employees, to cope with burgeoning traffic across its branches nationwide.

With 1,255 stores around the country and a staff of 54,000, the retailer needed a system to manage email storage, especially with the growing legal requirements on how long emails must be retained in case they ever need to be presented as evidence in court.

Having successfully installed KVS's Enterprise Vault last year, Somerfield has now embarked on the second phase of the project, which will give individual users their own email vault.

By using individual vaults instead of the storage-hungry PST file option offered by Microsoft Outlook, the system will be able to hold files in a central repository in their original form, but compressed and secured so that only the company can delete them.

Somerfield corporate cost audit controller, Colin Clarke, said the retailer wanted to do more than just throw additional disk space at the problem of storing all the emails for its 3,500 Microsoft Exchange users.

"The cost of disk wasn't the problem, but rather the cost of information loss and the legal implications that would go with it," said Clarke.

Enterprise Vault sits on its own server, alongside the Exchange server, and polls SMTP journals, pulling out emails and storing them on its own locally attached disk.

It keeps emails as a single occurrence, so if an identical message has been sent to 100 employees, only one copy will be in the vault. Though archived, the data remains visible and accessible to users, as Enterprise Vault leaves tags in their Exchange client where once the email itself would have resided.

The system has also helped Somerfield analyse email traffic by, for instance, keywords or file size.

"We found that the biggest growth was in unauthorised traffic - stuff that was in breach of company policy," said Clarke.