In most organizations, Microsoft Outlook Data Files, such as personal storage table (PST) files, reside on a user's local computer, network shares, or both. The number of Microsoft Outlook items in PST files can increase rapidly when users exchange emails and perform other tasks such as add calendar items, tasks and journal entries, and so on. Backing up and restoring personal folders that are on local workstations rather than on the email server can pose the following challenges for an administrator.
-
Unprotected enterprise critical information
Personal folders may contain critical information, such as customer details, upcoming product plans, marketing strategies and sensitive financial information that your organization must retain, search for and restore.
In an enterprise environment, it is impossible to backup or archive the Outlook folders as these files reside on a local workstation.
-
Increased storage intensive growth
Each PST file contains all the Outlook folders of a user. This includes the Inbox, Calendar and Contacts. With each new email message or item that a user adds, the size of the PST file increases significantly, requiring corresponding increase in the storage space.
-
Risk of damaged or lost files
Local or removable storage media are excluded from a company's standard backup processes. As a result, personal folders that are stored on local or removable storage media are susceptible to data corruption or loss and cannot be recovered.
-
Non-compliance with data retention regulations
A common practice for data retention is to delete all mails from the mail server and from the backed up or archived copies after a specified length of time. In contrast, unmanaged or unprotected PST files stored on workstations are considered non-compliance risks.
Archiving
Use PST archiving as an enterprise solution to archive and restore PST files. You can archive a set of PST files from local workstations, shared locations, or both to secondary storage.
When PST files are archived, they can be a part of your organization's archival and restore processes.
For example, you can browse, search for, and restore archived PST files.
You can permanently delete archived PST files from their source location and maintain only the archived copies on a secondary storage for a specified duration of time to satisfy the compliance needs.
PST archiving provides the following features and functions:
-
Automated collection of PST files.
-
For PST files that are available on laptops and desktops, use Edge Endpoint Solutions Overview.
-
For PST files that are available in the shared locations, use OnePass for one of the following:
-
-
Ownership detection
The PST archiving solution can detect ownership of PST files based on files, laptops or the user home folder on a network share.
-
Message level retention based on message received time
You can reclaim space on the secondary storage by aging specific messages based on their time of receipt.
-
Self service
Users can recover archived messages using Outlook Add-In, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Universal Recall Link, and the Web Console.
-
Integrated view for all archived messages
For users, experience of viewing the archived PST files and the archived messages from the online mailbox will be identical as that of viewing regular mailbox items using Outlook Add-In, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Universal Recall Link, and the Web Console.