Case Study

Belfast HSC Trust

Public Sector Health Profile: One of largest Trusts in UK, delivering integrated health and social care to 340,000 people Situation: Requirement for email archiving, analysis and reporting Solution: Deployed MailMeter for email archiving,

“Before engaging with Waterford Technologies, I hadn’t seen any simple and fast products to deploy email compliance management on the market. We are now saving an extraordinary amount of time and money since the deployment of MailMeter. This tool is so powerful, its search feature can scan across 22,000 mailboxes in just a few seconds and no adept training is required which eliminates the additional cost and burden from the IT department.”

Ken Leung, ICT Services Manager
IT & Telecommunications (Operations),
Belfast Health & Social Care Trust

CHALLENGE

Belfast Trust came into existence in April 2007 and is responsible for the services formerly delivered by six separate Trusts which were merged in March of that year. One of the major challenges was that separate Trusts were running different email systems and subsequently had varied policies too. This resulted in increasing storage cost and revamping of data governance policies. As a public sector body, it was a key requirement to retain all data in a tamper-proof archive and adhere to all the essential compliance regulations.

Ken Leung, ICT Services Manager, IT & Telecommunications (Operations) at Belfast Trust, realised the need for the right software to control the compliance of their data and control the storage cost.

REQUIREMENTS

Easy to deploy solution to satisfy requests from data subjects for all departments
Prove GDPR compliance and avoid penalties for non-compliance
Easily search through Belfast Trust emails and attachments from a single repository
Reduce expensive storage costs and back up time
MailMeter is a cloud or on-premise based email management and compliance platform where you can find every single email in your organisation, conduct eDiscovery, freedom of information, and DSAR’s searches directly from your desktop anywhere. The platform gives you the ability to narrow the scope of your search across email using clearly defined criteria.
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SOLUTION

Ken and his team knew that an email compliance and management solution was the answer and set about evaluating the products on the market. One of the original Trusts employed MailMeter Email Archiving from Waterford Technologies effectively and another had the reporting module. Therefore, it made sense to them to include Waterford Technologies in the evaluation process alongside products from a number of other leading vendors.

“We managed to reclaim nearly 50% of expensive storage space”

“It was a unanimous decision to choose Waterford Technologies in 2007, they were the best on the market from a product functionality point of view. It took just a few days to install whereas other suppliers had proposed to take weeks or even months.”
Ken Leung, ICT Services Manager
Belfast Health & Social Care Trust

Benefits

Meets Governance Obligations

MailMeter is used by the Trust to address areas of governance, email monitoring, retention, and compliance. The non-invasive email monitoring functionality allows the HR department to address issues such as early risk detection, corporate privacy, and non-compliance with the Trust’s compliance and email policies.

The email management functionality allows the Trust to perform in-depth searching and analysis of all past and present email activity regardless of whether users have deleted emails from their mailbox, ensuring full and easy compliance with Freedom of Information, GDPR and other data regulations. With MailMeter, the Trust can now cater to compliance requests with ease. It has increased the efficiency by automating data management and diluting the risk.

Archiving and Reducing The Storage

Niall Murray, ICT Infrastructure Manager at Belfast Trust says “We had about 6TB of old email data and after the first round of stubbing this has already been cut by nearly 50 percent, allowing us to reclaim expensive storage and keep the MailMeter archive on cheaper storage“.

Fast, Complete Responses to Data Requests

The Governance team at Belfast Trust can receive numerous data requests per month. The team is now able to respond to DSAR’s promptly without IT assistance. MailMeter search capabilities enable the governance team to satisfy such requests quickly and accurately.

The team can search for all personal data, with easy export and redaction for effective compliance. Ken estimates that the organisation is saving a great deal of time and money on this process and it is has freed up the IT team by having a search feature that is simple to use for all departments with the required permissions.

Backup Now Within Window

Before the deployment of the solution, it was taking 16+ hours to run full backups, which extended into core office working hours and impacted users’ connectivity.

After the first round of stubbing the backup window has been reduced by 10 hours and currently takes 6 hours to complete, falling within the Trust’s backup window of 12 hours maximum.

Saves IT Staff Resources

One of the key reasons for choosing Waterford Technologies solution was its simple and appealing architecture, which makes it easy to deploy and maintain. It’s very important for us that the solution doesn’t require any specialist administration skills and therefore isn’t costly to operate on an ongoing basis” says Ken Leung.

Helpdesk calls have been reduced too, as users can now search and retrieve old or lost emails from their own desktop

Summary

“I have to add that throughout the course of the engagement of the project, communication and support from Waterford Technologies has been first class.”
Ken Leung, ICT Services Manager, IT & Telecommunications (Operations),
Belfast Health & Social Care Trust