Global Financial Institution Turns to S2|DATA to Relocate, Restore, Preserve & Remove Legacy Email Data

Overview

A global bank aimed to reduce the financial and reputational risks associated with maintaining thousands of historical mailboxes. The email data was located in APAC, EMEA, and NA within an outdated and unsupported EMC Networker environment retained on Dell Data Domain devices. The original storage infrastructure was spread worldwide across multiple outsourced data centers. To meet the client’s deadlines, the goal was to consolidate this environment into two locations and preserve over 3,000 of the 90,000 mailboxes before defensibly destroying all others and decommissioning the aging Data Domain appliances and EMC Networker environment. S2|DATA provided solutions alongside FTI Technology’s expert team to support the client throughout the data remediation exercise. S2|DATA’s proprietary TRACS platform helped in handling legacy data systems, scraping metadata and culling custodians to achieve the client’s objectives.

The Challenge

There were a number of challenges with this environment.

• Unsupported Data Domain Environment: The infrastructure was no longer under active support, complicating direct access to required data
• Worldwide Distributed Infrastructure: Infrastructure was spread across 3 continents and generated significant maintenance and running costs.
• Backup Complexity, Data Domain Disk Backups via EMC Networker: We completed the task without utilizing EMC Networker. Instead, we accessed the disk storage directly using an in-house application to extract relevant information from the Exchange Information with Networker backups stored on Data Domain disk.
• Large-Scale Mailbox Extraction: Thousands of user mailboxes needed preservation, requiring robust processes for accuracy, timeliness, and cost-efficiency.
• Filtering for Preservation: The restored data was necessary to comply with legal requirements, including deduplication and responsive data filtering.

The Solution

S2|DATA established a secure caged facility in Atlanta and a European datacenter to handle the operation. Using our experienced teams, exclusive TRACS platform and custom-developed processes, the team delivered a multi-stage solution:

Stage 1: Data Collection & Datacenter Creation

• Global Secure Logistics: The S2|DATA team executed the decommissioning process from multiple locations globally. Using our staff we provided specialized air and land white glove services to transfer data into two newly established data centers.
• Recreation of the Data Domain Environment: We constructed a replica of the original Data Domain storage subsystem

Stage 2: Mailbox Creation and Reconstruction

• Custom Mailbox Scanning: We accessed the disk storage directly using a proprietary in-house application to extract relevant information from the catalog files.
• Targeted Restoration: The application identified and filtered Exchange backup sessions by date. After finalizing the production list, we utilized TRACS to restore relevant Exchange Information Stores (EDB files) from the historic backups for the specified custodians.

Stage 3: Data Reduction and Transfer for Review

• Custodian-Level Deduplication: S2|DATA’s used its QuickCull tool to deduplicate the restored mailboxes at the custodian level to eliminate redundant data
• Responsive Filtering: S2|DATA filtered mailboxes by responsive date ranges to include only relevant emails, further reducing the dataset size

Stage 4: Deliverables and Transition to Review:

• Led weekly status update calls with three progress reports:
  
  • Reconciliation and Feedback Loop
  • Hard drive contents: the custodian; location of data, size of data and backup source date; transition to review
  • PST copies were transferred to a hard drive, hand-delivered to FTI, and ingested into Relativity

The Outcome

The S2|DATA team achieved the customer’s goals.

• Timely Email Restoration: Successfully delivered thousands of mailboxes within the client’s deadlines.
• Cost Reduction & Risk Mitigation: Defensibly preserved only the legally required custodian mailboxes while eliminating all others, ensuring compliance and reducing unnecessary data retention risks. Permanently decommissioned the global Data Domain environment, resulting in cost reduction through the sunsetting of multiple legacy systems, third-party providers, and data centers. Additionally, eliminated the need for MS Exchange and Networker licensing, as well as support and maintenance costs for Data Domain, reinforcing cost savings. These strategic actions have supported reduction of future discovery and disclosure obligations, streamlining data management and legal compliance efforts
• Compliance Assurance: The final dataset met all legal and regulatory requirements for eDiscovery.
• Data Integrity: The extracted catalog files and restoration processes ensured the accuracy and completeness of the restored email.