Redding Bank of Commerce understands the value of email and the importance of storing it securely and being able to retrieve it easily. With compliance rules to be followed, archiving email is not an option – it is an absolute must. That’s why the bank chose GFI Archiver® to be able to meet stringent compliance rules and to provide its 180 employees the ability to easily retrieve lost or accidently deleted messages.

Archiving keeps bank’s email valuables in vault

Rob McQueen, assistant security analyst for Redding, said the bank installed GFI Archiver in 2005 to meet audit and legal requirement for its email communications.

Having email and files archived can save companies from massive compliance fines and legal penalties. When auditors call, you want all the core electronic communications at your fingertips.

Mr. McQueen’s top priorities are audits, compliance and HR concerns: “GFI meets the requirements set forth for a financial institution of our size and type. Audits and HR issues arise from time to time and the GFI solution meets or exceeds our requirements time and again.”

Choosing GFI

There is an array of archiving tools on the market, so what compelled Redding to pick GFI?

“For their ease of use, minimal time fussing with the application/server backend, great uptime percentage, reporting and search features,” Mr. McQueen explained.

The decision has paid off. “As the person who maintains the archiving solution, I’ve found it easy to deploy, easy to upgrade, and is rarely, if ever, down for my end users,” he added.

Mr. McQueen recently upgraded his GFI Archiver implementation and installed it on a new server.

“This required dismounting databases, and timing it so that email wouldn’t be lost during the transition. I was able to accomplish this in stages by building and installing the GFI Archiver software on the new server, then planning for the cutover during non-business hours. I used the GFI support staff to guide me through the process and they were able to answer my questions quickly and not give me the run around, which is common when dealing with enterprise support. The cutover went as planned and we are pleasantly surprised with the latest version, especially the reporting features. Upper management loves reports and the new features in GFI’s latest version make us look really good,” Mr. McQueen said.

The upgrade wasn’t just smooth for IT, but end users as well. “Our immediate results were the continued archiving of email and no loss of information. There were zero complaints from our users moving to the newer version.”

GFI-onomics

The economics of GFI Archiver are sound on both the business and IT sides.

“The product is affordable and meets our needs as budgeted. When called upon for an HR need, or an audit requirement, the time spent finding the information we need is drastically reduced using the product,” Mr. McQueen said. “We feel the licensing costs are competitive and the storage cost is not an issue since it is a mandated cost per a legal requirement.”

With its advanced full text indexing-based search engine, one can look for words within email bodies, attachments, and files using an array of criteria. Mr. McQueen finds this style of search a great convenience: “Being able to quickly find emails 4-5 years old without digging through Exchange backups saves us hours of time.”

“GFI Archiver is one of our favorite applications to manage because it rarely needs attention. Any server/application that doesn’t need constant attention is truly beneficial for any enterprise datacenter. When looking at software for other applications we tend to use what we know works. GFI is one of those,” Mr. McQueen said. “It really does what we need it to do. There are times when software tries to do too much, which creates problems. Keeping things simple makes GFI Archiver pretty bulletproof for our needs.”

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