Intapeople Customer Story

From PSTs to proper archiving: why a recruitment firm chose us

Rob Samuel needed a thorough and secure way to archive his employer’s emails. For the past few years, the IT Manager of a Cardiff-based recruitment firm had been backing up Exchange 2013 with an EVault-based product, and storing emails on local PSTs. He knew that PST files could be easily corrupted and difficult to search, and were therefore not good for archiving.
 

On top of this, he’d learned that back-up solutions (e.g. Datto) didn’t stop users from deleting emails in between back-up windows, which meant some emails would not be backed up at all.

Email archiving vs backups

Rob says: “We wanted belt and braces – every single message captured and journaled.” If any disputes or any issues were to arise, and management needed to refer to old emails, he didn’t want there to be any “risk of messages going AWOL or being deleted.”
 

Even when the firm migrated from its on-site Exchange to Office 365, he could see the platform’s archiving function would still not be enough. While Office 365 had many virtues, it wasn’t compliant with regulations like GDPR. In addition, it didn’t stop users from altering emails, and Microsoft would not accept liability for his employer’s data. What he needed, he decided, was one central repository for all emails: an independent, cloud-based, fully compliant archiving solution.
 

Also, as he would occasionally be tasked with searching for client data or information about a particular candidate contained in old emails, he wanted a solution that could find the relevant data quickly.

Choosing Cryoserver over Barracuda

Rob’s server backup/DR solution provider recommended Cryoserver. In addition to us, Rob looked at Barracuda* and one or two other providers. So, why did he and his employer choose our solution?

“Cryoserver had the best balance of functionality, ease of use and cost as well. [Cryoserver’s people] were knowledgeable and helpful. Others were trying to make us transfer our email security filtering across to them [as well as our archiving] and take out licenses with them.”

So, in 2017, the recruitment firm picked us to archive its emails.

“Moving to Cryoserver was really good,” Rob says. “We did a staged approach, with an initial ingest of all the mail boxes from our on-site Exchange to Cryoserver [to make sure everything was backed up and being journaled]. I did it myself with some guidance from the guys at Cryoserver. At the time, I hadn’t done much configuration with Exchange [or worked with] the transport rules or journaling, but it was very easy to set up and manage.”
 

Enhancing Microsoft 365
 

He says he wouldn’t change anything about Cryoserver. “It’s reliable. It ties in with Microsoft 365 well. It allows you to go as basic or as advanced as you want with the searches.”
 

Rob performs most of the searches, “going back three, five, even 10 years in some cases,” and finds Cryoserver  “very fast and effective”. He likes the fact that everything is fully audited as well. “I can look back and see what searches have been run previously. It’s all there. When doing exports and having to trawl through reams and reams of data, it’s very fast.”

Helpful support

So far, Rob has asked us for help with two advanced searches. “Every time I have got in touch with the guys in Support they have been really helpful and knowledgeable and haven’t palmed me off to four or five different departments. It’s been very responsive.”

He says Cryoserver “has gone above and beyond” his expectations. It’s proven to have a lot more value than just a real time back-up tool, particularly when searching for GDPR requests.