Case Study: Tax Law Office
Intradyn Orca Virtual Appliance Customer
“As a tax-law office, email is pretty mission-critical. Our tax attorneys are conversing with clients over email all the time,” said Office Administrator Thomas Mohagen of Tax Law Office.
“We were previously using Outlook® to archive email, and then we had an onsite backup appliance that would replicate the info and send it off-site nightly to two different sites: one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast.” Mohagen said.
THE CHALLENGE
“After five years on a partially virtual environment, in January 2013 we went completely virtual. Now, we’ve got a virtual environment using VMware® and Citrix®. Our employees use Outlook and our mailserver is Exchange 2010®,” he said.
While proceeding to upgrade to a fully virtual environment, Tax Law Office needed a virtual appliance that provided a simpler, more secure email-archive process with greater search capabilities.
“A virtual environment offers much more flexibility while fully utilizing the investment an organization has made in its infrastructure,” said Intradyn Director of Sales Engineering Mike Kieffer.
THE SOLUTION
Tax Law Office did not consider any other email archive solutions. “We just went with our VAR’s recommendation,” Mohagen said. “They’ve been using Intradyn products for a while now.” “We do a lot of work with High Point Networks (http://www.highpointnetworks.com),” Powers said. “Scores of their clients are running Intradyn email archive solutions.”
“The total cost of ownership has been reasonable, in the grand scheme of things,” Mohagen said. “Our total cost to upgrade to a fully virtual environment was $100,000, and I think it was $4500 for the Orca virtual appliance and three years of support.”
With Intradyn’s email archiving appliance solutions, not even the IT administrator can alter or otherwise modify the archived messages. The only way messages can be deleted from the appliance is based upon the organization’s retention policy; for instance, after 7 years, messages start dropping off the system. Even then, however, the legal hold tag is the only thing that will override that: no matter the retention period set into the appliance.
“It is very reassuring to our customers that the Intradyn email archiving solutions meet the most stringent regulations and other requirements for daily business.”
– Pat Powers
“This gives the IT person and compliance officer a lot of control. Let’s say they decide for a county, they have a 5-year retention policy, but they can also keep any one department’s email for 7 years. They could also tag the mail for an individual, like the in-house attorney, so that those emails are never deleted,” Powers said.
THE CONCLUSION
“As far as I know, there isn’t anywhere that Orca has fallen short for us,” Mohagen said. “Plus, the security of having our email archives readily available in media that’s going to be around for a while is great.”
