Symantec has updated its Enterprise Vault archiving software with a mix of data classification technology and a new focus on social media content.
In Enterprise Vault 10, Symantec is touting data classification as a means to help ease the archiving of Microsoft Exchange e-mail content and metadata as well as the ability to automatically archive content from social media sites such as Facebook.
“Businesses around the world know how important it is to protect and preserve e-mail, IM and documents, spreadsheets and other unstructured information. These same business must also evolve to recognize that social media information is equally important,” explained Greg Muscarella, senior director of product management for Symantec’s Information Management Group, in an email interview with SecurityWeek. “With so many users accessing and sharing information on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many others it’s more important than ever for companies to have controls in place to not only secure information from viruses and other risks, but to capture and preserve the information for legal and compliance purposes.”
Being able to capture social information is critical for organizations required to comply with open records requests, supervision requirements under the FINRA 10-06 amendments and any legal requests that may come, Muscarella added.
“The more employees using these outlets the greater the risk to organizations,” he said.
When it comes to Microsoft Exchange, Symantec is leveraging the data classification technology from its data loss prevention product to enable the analysis of e-mail content and metadata to help determine the archiving and retention strategy for all messages. The classifications can also be used as filters to speed up the search and review process for eDiscovery, according to the company.
“Data Classification Services helps organizations meet information retention requirements and enforce e-mail management policies, and each company determines its own archiving policies based on relevant regulations and its own corporate governance policies,” Muscarella said. “Once e-mail is classified, policy enforcement technology, which may be shared with Symantec Data Loss Prevention implementations, applies retention and expiry rules across different classes of e-mail to ensure it is kept only as long as it is needed. In addition, Data Classification Services enables you to automatically assign unique tags to messages, helping speed up proactive and/or reactive search or discovery requests. Providing classification context adds more value to the data stored in the archive and allows for a more intelligent means by which to search, discover, and leverage relevant content.”
For businesses utilizing social media, Enterprise Vault 10 uses Symantec’s partnerships with Actiance, CommonDesk, Globanet, Hanzo and Socialware to automatically archive social media interactions for compliance, eDiscovery and corporate governance purposes. According to Muscarella, posts to an organization’s publicly-facing social media outlets – from blogs to Facebook to Twitter – are considered business communications that must be preserved according to the same industry-specific regulations regarding data retention as emails, instant messages and other electronic records.
Other features include the ability to locate and move existing .PST and .NSF files into the archive, as well as the ability to archive information by storing just one copy of a file or message regardless of the number of times it occurs or where it is stored.
“Businesses have learned how important it is to protect and preserve email, IM, documents, spreadsheets and other unstructured information, and they’re learning that the same is true for social media records,” said Brian Dye, vice president of product management at Symantec, in a statement. “We’ve increased the scale and performance of Enterprise Vault so our customers can effectively archive and discover the millions of records employees are creating by email, social media, SharePoint and file systems. Enterprise Vault 10 can significantly reduce risks, especially for organizations in highly litigious or regulated industries, without inhibiting the business and productivity benefits of social media and collaboration tools.”
