Barracuda Networks Message Archiver FAQ

What is the Barracuda Message Archiver? What are the benefits of email archiving?

The Barracuda Message Archiver captures and stores all sent and received emails throughout an organization. With the growing need to be litigation ready and regulatory compliant, the Barracuda Message Archiver enables an organization to enforce corporate and compliance regulations by capturing all email, providing quick email retrieval, and alerting internal and external auditors of potential email policy violations.

As email storage requirements continue to increase, the Barracuda Message Archiver also reduces storage requirements by removing duplicate instances of messages and by compressing stored messages. In addition, the Barracuda Message Archiver can reduce costs by transferring email from your email servers’ higher-cost transactional storage systems to lower-cost archival storage systems.

Couldn’t I keep PST files or back up my email server? What does the Barracuda Message Archiver do differently?

While email server backups and PST files (Outlook archive files) have been used historically, their use has also posed a number of challenges:

• Inability to do global searches across time. Email server backups generally reflect the state of a message store at a particular point in time. PST files generally only contain the email for a single user. Nether solution offers a global repository from where you can conduct email searches of all current and archived emails, impacting the ability to efficiently fulfill a discovery request.
• No guarantee that all messages are retained. Neither email server backups nor PST files help you comply with regulations or legal requirements. It is entirely possible as well that email may be deleted before being stored in a PST file or being backed up, preventing the ability to keep an archived copy.
• Inefficiencies in storage and retrieval. Maintained by individual users, storing messages in PST files generally result in duplicate messages and wasted disk space. While email server backups may help reduce redundant use of disk space, retrieving email backups can be extremely time consuming.

The Barracuda Message Archiver is a complete and affordable email indexing and archiving solution, used to maximize email storage capacity and enforce corporate, legal and regulatory compliance. Leveraging a standard set of policies and seamless message access, email content is fully indexed and backed up to enable administrators, auditors and end users quick retrieval of any email message stored in an organization’s email archive as a global knowledge center.

Why should I deploy a message archiving appliance such as the Barracuda Message Archiver?

The Barracuda Message Archiver represents a unique combination of powerful features, ease of deployment and a compelling price point that does not entail any separate license fees per user, per mailbox or per email server.

Unlike software-only solutions, the Barracuda Message Archiver deploys in minutes without the need to obtain or integrate separate hardware, operating system licenses, SQL database servers and archiving software.

Unlike external hosted services, the Barracuda Message Archiver enables messages to be retained within an organization’s physical and network security systems. Organizations can generally achieve greater network traffic performance by accessing message stores on fast internal links rather than over public Internet connections.

What email servers are supported?

Designed with flexibility in mind, the Barracuda Message Archiver supports email servers that offer journaling as well as those that do not. For deployment with email servers that don’t support journaling, Barracuda Networks recommends deploying the Barracuda Message Archiver in conjunction with the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

Can I deploy the Barracuda Message Archiver with the Barracuda Spam Firewall?

Yes. The Barracuda Spam Firewall is the ideal complement to the Barracuda Message Archiver, especially for use with email servers that do not support journaling. The Barracuda Spam Firewall supports its own journaling feature that enables copies of messages to be sent directly to the Barracuda Message Archiver. While the Barracuda Spam Firewall protects organizations from spam, viruses, spoofing, phishing, spyware and other email-borne threats, the Barracuda Message Archiver indexes and stores all of an organization’s emails for quick retrieval, policy monitoring and storage efficiency.

What are the benefits of the Barracuda Message Archiver for an email administrator? What are the benefits for an end user? What can an auditor do?

The greatest benefit for an email administrator is the ability to achieve greater messaging efficiency by reducing the information storage load on production email servers. In addition, administrators are prepared to easily satisfy requirements from litigation holds or discovery requests with the powerful and affordable Barracuda Message Archiver.

End users benefit by having a global repository for their current and archived emails, eliminating the hassle of managing storage quotas set by email administrators thus creating a comprehensive knowledge management tool. The Barracuda Message Archiver also enables seamless access to all email and provides powerful searching capabilities.

Auditors reap the benefits of both administrator and end user features, while maintaining a history of accessed emails for any future litigation or compliance inquiries. Using the same Web user interface, an auditor can quickly and easily access emails of all users through the Archive Search tool and run reports for monitoring activity and data usage.

How does the Barracuda Message Archiver index email?

The Barracuda Message Archiver fully indexes emails based on multiple message attributes, including sender, recipient, received date, created date, subject line, size, attachments, importance, words and phrases in the message body, and contents of email attachments. Emails can also be further tagged for in-depth searches in the case of legal discovery, regulatory compliance requirements or for efficient sorting of large repositories of emails.

How does the Barracuda Message Archiver monitor corporate and compliance policies? For instance, what if we wanted to be notified when foul language is used in a message?

To enforce corporate and compliance guidelines, the Barracuda Message Archiver ships with a standard set of policies that monitor behaviors, such as use of foul language, transmitting personal identifying information, list of most frequently visited job searching Web sites as well as customizable policies to monitor use of selected keywords. Upon installation, administrators can immediately begin monitoring policy violations and store email for any auditors.

Custom policies can also be created by auditors to address more specific needs of an organization. For instance a physician’s office may need to personalize a standard policy to fully comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The Barracuda Message Archiver enables the auditor to customize specific criteria to ensure all email messages are compliant with applicable regulations.

The Barracuda Message Archiver can also conduct ad hoc searches using the Archive Search tool.

What kind of reporting capabilities are present?

The Barracuda Message Archiver starts with a basic set of reports that provide a high-level view on the status of the system and global email archive. Email administrators and auditors can track the growth of the email archive, maintaining a pulse on the rate of usage and scale as needed. Another report compiles the current audit trail of the global email archive for legal counsel and administrators to conduct regular reviews. The Barracuda Message Archiver can also report on policy violations to monitor individuals and act on any potential risk and liability. Lastly, individuals can run reports to monitor the integrity of their personal archive.

How does the Barracuda Message Archiver address and assist administrators with fulfilling compliance requirements?

Compliance regulations are a growing aspect of a system administrator’s duties, requiring email retention and retrieval of all communications. Popular government regulations include, Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and HIPAA that require organizations to provide data permanence, security of data and the ability to audit archived email.

For FRCP and SOX, the Barracuda Message Archiver ensures all email sent and received by a company is stored, searchable, tracks access records and can be delivered in a timely manner in easily-accessible file formats.

For HIPAA requirements, the Barracuda Message Archiver offers preset policies that alert the administrator and/or auditor when personally identifiable information, such as social security numbers, is transmitted in clear text.

How does the Barracuda Message Archiver help with a legal requests such as a litigation hold or discovery request?

For an organization in the process of filing or are in the midst of litigation, legal counsel will request a “litigation hold” on all paper and electronic communications related to the case in the event they are required to produce said documentation during the course of the proceedings.. Similarly in a discovery request, corporate legal counsel and the opposing party will request that all paper and electronic documents pertaining to the case be shared for the purpose of full disclosure.

By using the powerful index and tagged searching capabilities of the Barracuda Message Archiver, auditors and email administrators can easily search through the complete email archive of an organization to compile relevant emails based on keywords, dates and sender/recipients to create an exported file. The Barracuda Message Archiver also provides email administrators and auditors with the ability to track access records and enables policy alerts if a litigation hold or other custom policies related to the litigation has been violated.

How does the Barracuda Message Archiver maximize the storage capacity?

The Intelligent Storage Manager provides a comprehensive view of the amount of used and available storage. Once email has been filtered and any duplicates or attachments have been removed, the data is automatically compressed before storing it into a file system. With the use of single-instance storage, the Barracuda Message Archiver intelligently archives emails to maximize physical storage capacity.

What if I exceed the storage capacity, can I also use an external storage unit? How do I manage that?

The Barracuda Message Archiver starts with a generous amount of internal storage depending upon the model. Beyond the internal storage that comes with the Barracuda Message Archiver, the Intelligent Storage Manager in the Barracuda Message Archiver firmware assists email administrators in making decisions on various external storage configurations to either: concatenate volumes to add external storage capacity or to mirror storage for redundancy. If external storage is required for the expanding or adding redundancy to the email repository, the Barracuda Message Archiver can scale externally through the use of standard file systems that support the CIFS or NFS protocols.

What types of data redundancy is provided?

Depending on the model, internal storage redundancy is provided through either RAID-1 or RAID-5 swappable disk subsystems and can be augmented by mirroring volumes to external storage devices over the network.

Can the Barracuda Message Archiver import historical emails?

Yes. The Barracuda Message Archiver can archive emails from PST files, as well as emails currently on an email server. To ease the archiving process on Microsoft Exchange servers, an email administrator can designate end users and times to begin importing emails through a MAPI-based utility. For other standards-based emails, the Barracuda Message Archiver also supports import of emails currently on the email server through both POP3 and IMAP.

Can I export emails? What formats are supported?

Yes. Designed to provide complete control over an email archive, the Barracuda Message Archiver can export emails in a variety of formats, including PST files by all end users. Auditors are the only authorized users that can export emails of multiple users.

How do end users access the Barracuda Message Archiver?

End users can access the Barracuda Message Archiver through the Web user interface, using their usual network access information through Active Directory or any other LDAP-compatible directory servers. In the Web user interface, end users can search their personal email archives, view emails in the archive and forward emails to their active mailboxes.

How can end users search their archive?

Once logged in to the Web user interface, the Archive Search tool can easily conduct full-text searches based on tags or content in message fields, depending upon the depth of indexing applied on past emails. Searches can be conducted by administrators, end users or auditors, who can also conduct global email searches.

What is included in the Energize Updates for the Barracuda Message Archiver?

Energize Updates from Barracuda Central deliver updates on the extensive library of virus definitions to block virus and spyware variants, policy definitions to enable enhanced monitoring of compliance and corporate guidelines, and document format updates to stay current on document enhancements for decoding content, as well as security updates to ensure that the underlying Barracuda Message Archiver platform remains free of any potential security vulnerabilities. Energize Updates subscriptions also provide access to Basic Support, Firmware Maintenance and optional participation in the Barracuda Early Release Firmware program.

What do I do if I have more questions, want to see an online demo of the Barracuda Message Archiver or purchase the Barracuda Message Archiver?

For answers to additional questions, please contact us.