Banking - PST eradication

A global bank had a requirement to discover and migrate their PST files into user mailboxes so that they were under central control and the company compliance rules could be applied. The bank selected Barracuda PST Enterprise to assist with this huge task.

The bank consisted of around 180,000 users spread across the globe with about 40,000 servers. TrueSwift was engaged as migration specialists and a trusted Barracuda partner to perform the migrations.

Organisations need greater transparency to eliminate the legal and compliance risks of PST files as huge volumes are often created by users and stored throughout the IT infrastructure on laptops, desktops and removable devices. Files that are essentially off the grid may not be searchable by IT, making eDiscovery almost impossible as compliance teams might not even know they exist. With no centralised management, a lack of enforceable retention policies, an insecure format and a high probability that they contain sensitive corporate and PII information, PSTs are highly likely to fail a GDPR compliance test and risk costly litigation procedures.  

By eliminating PSTs for good, data security, enhanced user productivity and effective eDiscovery is possible. Compliance risks are mitigated, and IT workload and costs are significantly reduced.

Ownership
Once a PST file has been found, it may not be attached to a user in their mailbox and is not therefore always obvious who it belongs to.

Slow Links
The user may also be in a remote location with a very slow network connection that is required to collect the data to be processed.

File Corruption
PST files are frequently corrupted in everyday usage, resulting in valuable data being inaccessible to the user.

Password Protection
Password protection is frequently applied by end-users to provide a degree of security. Passwords are often forgotten or unknown in the case of files created by former employees.

Duplication

As a self-managed storage solution PST files are often copied to different folders and devices for access and backup purposes. This results in multiple versions of PST files that are ostensibly the same but may contain subtle differences.

Compliance
Laws and regulation may require data for specific users or groups of users to be handled differently to more common organisational standards or be subject to legal hold.

Data Residency
Country specific rules may determine that data cannot be processed or stored out of region. These requirements impact both the inflight processing and subsequent data storage.

Following evaluation of competing solutions, the bank selected Barracuda PST Enterprise as the preferred toolset. Utilising a distributed architecture, agents were deployed to end-user devices with a minimal server footprint to manage orchestration.

Each lightweight agent performed discovery and migration of the associated user’s device, operating as a background activity reporting back to the central migration servers.

TrueSwift integrated with the bank transformation project to provide subject matter expert knowledge to shape and inform project design decisions, moving the project from concept through testing to implementation. Operating closely with both the bank and vendor, TrueSwift consulting provided expertise spanning both the toolset and project delivery in complex environments.

A fully managed service was delivered by TrueSwift to see the project through challenges on the way to successful delivery.

TrueSwift enhanced the business intelligence capability for the project through the development of bespoke collection, analysis, and reporting of data to inform decision making within the project and to empower stakeholder engagement with senior executives.

To expedite the project completion, TrueSwift developed custom tooling to address environment specific challenges that were impacting discovery speed and the critical ownership detection owing to large volumes of orphaned data. Through the combination of TrueSwift’s migration expertise and development capability the project could adopt an agile approach.