EMC Adds E-mail Supervision Tool To Archiving Suite

It's been almost a year since EMC introduced SourceOne, its archiving platform that includes e-discovery and compliance capabilities to help companies manage ever-increasing stores of e-mail and instant messages. Now EMC has added SourceOne Email Supervisor to the suite. This module is designed to help companies monitor whether inbound and outbound messages are compliant with internal policies and external regulations.

Gregory Kosinski, director of product marketing in EMC's content management and archiving division, says the new module will help organizations determine whether messages abide by the requisite internal policies and industry regulations. For example, the module can help U.S. brokerage firms and securities dealers abide by the NASD Rules 3010 and 3100 that mandate procedures for monitoring electronic communications relevant to their business and employees, including reasonable communications supervision and auditable records of supervisory reviews. The module can also help healthcare providers protect patient records and manufacturing companies protect intellectual property, Kosinski says.

"Wherever email is used to communicate with customers, partners or third-parties, you need to ensure that email traffic is proper and doesn't violate any ethical, business or regulatory considerations," says Kosinski. Using the new module, businesses can establish rules and policies that determine which of the indexed messages in the archive (established by SourceOne Email Management) should be reviewed, and how often, and then present those sample messages for supervisory review to determine whether they violate policies and/or regulations. Supervisors can create and manage review groups and assign reviewers to each group. The module also documents the review actions and creates audit reports.

Similar products are already on the market, such as Symantec's Enterprise Vault Compliance Accelerator. "The difference for EMC is that it built an entirely new architecture for its SourceOne platform," says Brian Babineau, senior consulting analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. Babineau says the new architecture is more scaleable and designed to handle greater volumes of messages. With the addition of Email Supervisor, existing customers of EMC's SourceOne suite will now have access to a tool that's designed to automate the monitoring of email and other messages to lower risks and more efficiently govern information, he says.

EMC's SourceOne suite includes SourceOne Email Management, which collects and archives email from Exchange, Notes/Domino, SMTP and instant messages; SourceOne Discovery Manager, which finds content on servers through a search and collection process; and SourceOne Discovery Collector, an indexing appliance. SourceOne Email Supervisor only works with EMC's SourceOne suite.