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Enough about the 'what'.
Where's the technical,
how-to, what-if stuff?
If you're just interested in the nitty-gritty technical details, like how everything works and what if scenarios, you've come to the right place. Here goes.
The Archiving Process.
Fortiva uses Exchange journaling to automatically archive all your internal and external communications.
A pointer to any message that is sent or received through Exchange is added to the journaling mailbox. At configurable time intervals, the Fortiva appliance uses MAPI calls (and a user account that you provide) to login to Exchange and access the journaling mailbox, in exactly the same way that Outlook accesses a user's mailbox. If there are messages in the journaling mailbox, the Fortiva appliance divides them into batches, creates a subfolder for each batch of messages and moves the references into the folders.
The batches are then processed by the Fortiva appliance, DoubleBlind Encryption™ is applied, and messages are submitted to the Fortiva network for archiving. Periodically the Fortiva appliance requests confirmation from the Fortiva network that the batch has been fully processed. Upon confirmation, the batch folder is removed from the journaling mailbox.
- Mail cannot be lost if the Fortiva appliance or your network goes down. Unlike other hosted solutions, the Fortiva appliance pulls messages from the journaling mailbox. In the event of an issue with the Fortiva appliance or your internet connectivity, messages (even those in-transit at the point of failure) are secure within the journal mailbox.
- Instant Messages are archived through the use of third-party instant message proxy server software that you install in-house. The proxy server captures instant message conversations and converts them into SMTP messages that are then sent to your Exchange server to be subsequently archived and full-text indexed in the same way as other email messages.
- All messages are fully indexed after they reach the Fortiva appliance, including full text of the body and the content of over 300 types of file attachments. This allows you to search for and find words or phrases wherever they appear within the message or attached documents.
- Tight integration with Microsoft Exchange journaling and Active Directory simplifies IT user administration and management.
By placing an appliance inside the corporate network, behind your firewall, Fortiva can leverage your existing Active Directory settings and information. The Fortiva appliance uses a Windows account (that you provide) to login and retrieve user and group membership information. This information is used to authenticate user names and passwords for the user interface. It is also used to resolve the email addresses contained in messages back to the actual Active Directory user accounts.
With this information, the Fortiva network can effectively allow access by individual users to their mail without having to maintain separate user accounts or email address/user account relationships. Fortiva does not impact your Active Directory settings and does not require schema changes.
DoubleBlind Encryption™.
Our exclusive DoubleBlind Encryption technology gives you guaranteed security. No one can access your data but you - not even us.
The Fortiva appliance is placed on your corporate network behind your firewall. It encrypts your messages before transmitting them over a secure connection to the Fortiva network where they are stored in their encrypted form until you need them.
Messages are only decrypted when an authorized user on your network conducts a search from Outlook or from Fortiva's web-based user interface - meaning your data can never be viewed without access to both your Fortiva appliance (within your network) and the Fortiva network. Since all data within the Fortiva network is encrypted using your keys, even if someone penetrated Fortiva's heavily secured infrastructure, they would only see meaningless encrypted data. Certified duplicate copies of your data are maintained in multiple data centers to further guard against modifications.
As the Fortiva network will only accept requests from the IP addresses tied to the appropriate Fortiva appliance, even theft of your Fortiva appliance doesn't compromise the security of your data.
- Exchange journaling records a copy of all your email.
- The Fortiva appliance, which is located on your corporate network behind your firewall, retrieves, encrypts and securely transmits your email data to the Fortiva network, where it is stored in encrypted form.
- When an end user on your network conducts a search on Fortiva's web-based interface, or through Outlook, the search request is encrypted and sent to the Fortiva network.
- Search results are returned to the corporate network, decrypted in the appliance and transmitted to the end user in real time.
Outlook Search.
End users can easily search all their archived messages, including attachments, right from a search folder in Outlook. With real-time access to archived messages, overall productivity increases and the burden on IT is significantly decreased.
Fortiva can automatically create a special folder within Outlook that allows users to search through the archive of their own mail. When a user clicks on the folder, the Fortiva search screen appears in their main Outlook window, allowing them to perform searches of all their archived mail. This search functionality is similar to Outook's "find" feature, except that all content, including attachments is fully searched and the response time is nearly real-time - regardless of the size of the user's mailbox.
No software needs to be deployed. To create the Fortiva Archive folder within Outlook, Fortiva provides a utility that an Exchange administrator can run to automatically configure it on the Exchange server.
Stubbing.
Stubbing is an optional module that allows you to manage mailbox sizes by removing storage-intensive attachments from Exchange while keeping those attachments accessible to Outlook users.
Email attachments (which are stored in Exchange) are replaced with a much smaller "stub" that points to the copy of the attachment that is stored in the Fortiva Archive. The original attachment can be retrieved from the archive at any time for viewing or forwarding purposes.
The stubbing process takes place on a nightly basis (the exact time is configurable), automatically checking mailboxes and replacing attachments with stubs. The mailboxes this service checks, and the rules it uses to determine what attachments to stub, are defined in a stubbing policy. Unlike archiving, which happens as soon as a message is sent or received, stubbing occurs at a point in the future (for example, 30 days after a message is sent or received).
With stubbing in place, users get a seamless experience accessing attachments while keeping their Outlook folder structure - even though attachments are retrieved from the archive rather than Exchange. Users also benefit from virtually unlimited mailboxes - because the automated process helps them stay within their mailbox quotas. Fortiva's Attachment Stubbing means less data within Exchange for a faster, more reliable messaging system - without end-user compromises. Stubbing is supported on Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007.
Reports.
You can quickly and accurately assess email patterns and behavior on an ongoing basis with Fortiva reports.
These detailed reports can be accessed easily and immediately, and include the following information:
- Overview of storage growth requirements and email usage over time.
- Amount of email archived by user groups and individuals
- Supervision reports that reveal the effectiveness of the supervision process, including how many messages are in the queue
- Risk assessment reports that give you a graphical view of your exposure to potential risks due to non-compliance of your corporate email policy, allowing you to take immediate action when compliance issues arise.
- Audit reports of system and user activities.
Importing Existing Archived Email with Professional Services.
Fortiva Professional Services can import email from your existing archive, or from end user PST files, into your Fortiva archive. Imported messages are fully searchable for discovery or end user access.
Depending on your current solution, Fortiva may be able to work directly with your existing archiving system's data. In other cases you may be required to export the data to a common format, such as PST files. Using tools custom built for each data format, our service team converts the source data into Fortiva's standard data import format. Part of this conversion process includes tagging the message with the appropriate target disposition data for retention purposes.
The intake process includes extraction of attachment contents, full text indexing and writing data into the archive. All imported data is fully indexed and searchable. Fortiva Professional Services supports a wide variety of media formats, including DVDs and tapes.