Enterprise Vault for the Win
January 29, 2016

Enterprise Vault for the Win

Joshua Kirk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Symantec Enterprise Vault

As a law firm we use Enterprise Vault to store all of our email older than 120 days and to archive data from our file shares. We do this for every attorney and staff person, allowing users to search their own archives and for Attorneys and managers to search staff archives as needed. In addition, we use Enterprise Vault to hold onto departed user and Attorney emails allowing us to meet the ABA best practices and any regulations for retention. Then using the retention periods we are able to purge out older emails from departed users in an organized and formalized process.
  • The ability to import PST files has made it easy to add email that Attorneys bring with them, and to move from our legacy PST archives to the Enterprise Vault system.
  • The Vault Cache means users have available to them in Outlook a portion of their Vault in the familiar Outlook tree, which means users feel comfortable working in the system, often transparent to the archiving going on in the background
  • It's a very robust system, often very set it and forget. We rarely have to do much more than monitoring and basic patching on the system.
  • The ability to search attachments, not just subject and body of emails. This allows users to find attachments, or words in attachments.
  • Implementation of the servers is a very detailed and precise process. You have to match Windows versions, Outlook versions, and Exchange versions for supportability, optimal performance, and best practice.
  • The system lacks effective scale out documentation and planning. Scale out often requires breaking the roles apart, and the documentation does not clearly define how to do this.
  • If you scale out, user location migration can be problematic for moving their archive vaults for email.
  • We have seen a significant reduction in storage both for Exchange and block storage (from PST removal) due to deduplication
  • Our users find the ability to search their archive, the archives of past users, and subordinates as a fast and efficient way of finding historical data.
  • The ease of use of Enterprise Vault does make the business units prone to requesting to keep archive data for longer periods, which drives up retention and data storage needs.
Using Enterprise Vault means having a system that is not directly integrated in your backups, and not tied to the upgrade kadence of your backup systems is nice. With CommVault or other backup driven software the upgrade cycle and user experience is not always tied to the desktop products so users can be left using older versions. In addition, CommVault and other backup based software often does not have good litigation hold and search tools.
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