Symantec Adds Social Media Archiving To Enterprise Vault

Enterprise Vault 10 now allows nearly all of a company's communications, including e-mails, instant messages, and all social media interactions, to be archived for compliance and eDiscovery purposes, said Sean Regan, director of product marketing for Symantec's Information Management group.

Symantec has embedded its data loss prevention classification engine into Enterprise Vault 10, representing a new level of cross-product collaboration between storage and security, Regan said.

With the new capability, customers can write a policy about how to handle a type of corporate communication, and have that policy applied across the company's data loss prevention and data protection libraries, he said.

"So a policy could specify something like, all e-mails with the word 'finance' in them must be archived and, once archived, how they are classified," he said. "Not all e-mails are equal. They need to be classified. That's what the sharing of classifications between our data loss prevention and Enterprise Vault does. This is an evolution of storage and security."

Part of that evolution is to add the ability to encrypt corporate communications as they are archived, Regan said. Typically, encrypting an item means it most likely cannot be automatically searched for compliance or eDiscovery purposes.

"So we've integrated it with our PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) technology so that when Enterprise Vault sees an encrypted e-mail during the indexing process, Enterprise Vault and PGP decrypt it, index it, and then re-encrypt it," he said. "When it is needed for eDiscovery, customers can then go back to do a search on it."

The ability to make social media interactions as part of an archive is increasingly important as regulated companies are now facing requirements to retain all communications for eDiscovery, Regan said.

"Companies worry that lose lips sink ships, and want ways to identify their Facebook or Twitter or YouTube feeds," he said. "Enterprise Vault now classifies social media communications into archives for discovery later. So if someone says you promised me a free product in a Twitter message, now you can go back to find it."

The ability to classify and archive social media communications is actually not that difficult, Regan said. He worked at a company that did so with instant messages back in 2004, when the concept was new.

"The biggest issues are questions of what to keep, how to keep it, and where," he said. "But we have pretty much answered those questions. So it's easier to do with social media."

The new Enterprise Vault 10, which is currently available, provides the opportunity for solution providers to go to existing customers and add new solutions for e-mail and social media, Regan said.

Furthermore, Regan said, solution providers can start taking advantage of the company's new Clearwell technology, which it got with its recent acquisition of Clearwell, to expand on their eDiscovery solutions, Regan said.

Clearwell offered an end-to-end eDiscovery solution which addresses the entire eDiscovery process from identification and legal hold through review and production with a single application.

"The integration lets partners go in with Enterprise Vault 10, introduce Clearwell, and talk to customers' legal teams about eDiscovery," he said. "This is a chance for them to talk to a new buying center in their existing customers."