Veritas Enterprise Vault

Veritas Enterprise Vault is a very robust tool and it's still one of the most recognized players on data archiving. On the other hand, it is a tool that requires too much maintenance from the administrator. Especially because you're dealing with user data. In large environments/deployments, it would be better to have a dedicated Enterprise Vault administrator (someone with good knowledge of EV administration) to monitor the environment and take care of all the alerts. In our case, we didn't do this, and the price was very high. Due to some bad administration, we ended losing some archived data.

It is not linked to a specific hardware component and can be installed on any platform. It is a perfect solution for basically all companies and the user experience is simple and easy to use. Another positive point is that it has become the best solution for archiving emails and secret documents. The points of attention revolve around the cost for companies with many users. If there is no planning, it can become a major cost.

Archiving emails is what we currently use the product for. It's great at this and I believe we could expand it to capture more of our file system (maybe in the future). I love the search capability, particularly at the administrator level when responding to FOI requests. It certainly cuts down the effort!

Not sure about Discovery DA in Enterprise Vault. Should attempt to leverage Clearwell to address the ediscovery pieces.

I would recommend it to anyone that needs to archive employee emails. Whether it be simple record keeping or if you're required to hold email for litigation holds. The reason we no longer use Enterprise Vault is we moved our email service to the cloud, Office 365. Archiving is part of the service we pay for, and obviously we're no longer hosting email ourselves.

For our goal where we don't want to impose mailbox limits, it works great. Since you are offloading emails from Exchange to Symantec Enterprise Vault, I don't know how well it will work in a physical server as we are constantly adding more disk space and drives. In a virtual server, it's not too bad, but this might be a problem in a ph

I recommend Enterprise Vault, especially over native Exchange archiving when:
1. You have, or may need litigation holds and searches
2. There is a need to archive and set defined retention periods for Journaling
3. You have lots of duplicate large emails that you want to get deduplication of
4. You need/ want to be able to search attachment in addition to emails
5. You want or need Litigation searches or archive retention to be handled by a team separate from your Email team

Many of the server edition modules for Symantec Enterprise are the best in the industry, bar none. I would select their products every time for servers.
However, there are better workstation options out on the market.
Key questions to ask during the selection process:
1) It really comes down to price, what type of budget do you have?
2) Extra modules for any product normally cost extra, so make sure you buy the modules you need when you need them
3) Do want all your modules to exist under one platform or are you only looking at the cost and do not care about mixing & matching?

Enterprise Vault is useful with a well staffed IT organization as it requires having a dedicated support staff.