three terabytes of historical email data. To put it simply: They needed the ability to find the needle in a haystack.
The case study also shows how the TimeData solution for legal firms, unlike other data protection solutions on the market, responds to Legal IT demands for immediate access to deleted or changed email items. You can restore an individual mailstore or email object in minutes. And you can save money in the process. Kilpatrick Stockton reduced costs related to Exchange data retrieval by more than 90 percent.
Kilpatrick Stockton and Communication Trends
Kilpatrick Stockton is one of the largest international law firms with more than 500 attorneys in nine locations in the United States and Europe. It also has one of the nation's top intellectual property practices. The firm uses Internet and Web-based applications to facilitate communication between lawyers and clients. In addition, all attorneys are equipped with BlackBerrys® so that they can communicate with their clients in real-time regardless of their location.
The pervasive use of electronic communication at Kilpatrick Stockton has introduced new opportunities and challenges for attorneys. When communications break down, business breaks down. A primary form of communication with clients is email, making email a critical application for Kilpatrick Stockton. As attorneys know all too well, the smallest iota of data can affect the bottom line in very big ways.
Corporations and lawyers are all too familiar with recent landmark cases such as:
- Failure to produce historical email data to a U.S. District court cost Philip Morris USA
$2.75 million.
- Banc of America Securities paid a $10 million fine related to repeated failures to provide historical email data.
- When UBS Warburg failed to provide historical email evidence in a sexual discrimination lawsuit, the jury awarded the plaintiff $29.3 million.
The Challenge at Kilpatrick Stockton
Most if not all of the challenges associated with managing the vast amount of email in businesses data land at the feet of the almighty IT department. Companies worldwide task their IT departments with implementing an infrastructure that serves as the backbone for all corporate data management needs.
The challenge at Kilpatrick Stockton was to optimize the IT environment to eliminate financial, legal, and business risks related to the loss of Exchange server data.
Carol Hall, Associate Director of IT at Kilpatrick Stockton, identified three key risk factors that the firm needed the IT team to manage by remediating the corporate IT environment:
- Credibility: The reputation of law firms can suffer when client records of business conducted via email cannot be located.
- Liability: The legal impact to a client or to law firms due to loss of records, regulatory non-compliance, or records management non-compliance.
- Business sustainability: Loss of client data can impact a law firm's ability to provide timely accurate counsel to clients, potentially impacting sustainability of the client–law firm relationship.
Because of the fast-paced, dynamic, time-sensitive nature of the legal industry, critical business information and critical business records are often relayed only through email.
“In the legal industry, the technology can truly make or break the solutions we can deliver. Because it is not uncommon for clients to communicate critical information with their attorneys via email, not being able to recover an individual email message or calendar entry in a timely manner can be the difference between success or failure for a client transaction,” says Carol.
While attorney-client communications are critical, internal emails are also important.
Carol says, “There is so much going on with constant change and competing priorities. Corporate America today uses email in lieu of having face-to-face meetings. Having records of communications and decisions is critical for reference.”
Choosing a Data Protection Solution
When Carol came on board with Kilpatrick Stockton in 2005, the IT environment was prime for optimization to meet the needs of the law firm. The mandate for the IT team was to renew and replace the environment to provide more effective and efficient solutions. The IT team launched a project to find a solution that guarantees rock-solid data protection and ready-retrieval access. They needed a never-fail solution that was robust, extensible, easy to integrate into their existing infrastructure, and preferably easy to use.
Carol says, “We were looking for the capability of restoring our email system and retrieving granular data, such as an individual email, calendar entry, or contact. We needed to make sure our backups would always yield the needed data without increasing our backup windows.”
After an intensive search for a data protection and retrieval solution, the IT team at Kilpatrick Stockton decided to go with TimeData, TimeSpring Software’s flagship product, to augment their existing backup and recovery solutions for IT data.
“The more we learned about TimeData and how you can restore an individual email or calendar entry, the more impressed we were. That’s what pushed TimeData to the forefront in our selection process for a CDP solution,” says Carol. “We looked at the facts and found that TimeData is the most cost-effective solution that provides the capability to restore individual objects in a matter of minutes.”
TimeData Deployment
When Kilpatrick Stockton initially deployed TimeData in 2005, two TimeData Repository Servers were set up at the Atlanta headquarters to protect the Exchange servers at all U.S. sites. A third repository server was set up in London to the protect Exchange servers in London and Stockholm. Figure 1 shows the initial deployment design of TimeData at Kilpatrick Stockton.
See Figure 1.
One TimeData Repository Server in Atlanta was configured to protect an Exchange cluster. The cluster setup is Active-Active-Passive to support failover and failback events. Figure 2 shows the three-node Exchange cluster configuration at Kilpatrick Stockton.
See Figure 2.
Configuration
TimeSpring Customer Service Specialists worked with the Kilpatrick Stockton IT team to configure the TimeData Repository Server. The TimeData Agents that run on the protected data servers to monitor file system activity do not require any post-installation configuration.
When Kilpatrick Stockton initially deployed TimeData, the only configuration tasks were defining Content Groups and setting data retention policies. Now, TimeData offers additional configuration options, such as bandwidth throttling and data compression.
The Content Group is the unit of protection in TimeData. TimeData protection captures all of the changes to data in the Content Groups. Typically, a Content Group contains application-exclusive data, such as SQL data only or NTFS data only. However, a Content Group can be made up of a combination of NTFS, SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint data. Because Kilpatrick Stockton deployed the TimeData solution to protect their Exchange servers, the Content Groups that were defined contained Exchange data only. Although you can organize Content Groups to isolate critical data, the Kilpatrick Stockton IT Department organized their Content Groups based on geographic location.
The next configuration step was to configure data retention policies. TimeData provides a sophisticated yet easy-to-use mechanism for implementing data retention and deletion policies. TimeData retention policies are set by defining how long to keep data at various stages in the data lifecycle. The data lifecycle establishes the level of granularity for data that is stored in the repository. The lifecycle has several stages so that you can store varying levels of granularity as data ages. You can also define custom lifecycle stages.
Kilpatrick Stockton configured TimeData to conform to their corporate data retention policy. The following table shows the default lifecycle stages and the values that Kilpatrick Stockton specifies.
| Stage |
Description |
Kilpatrick Stockton Values |
| CDP |
During the CDP stage, data is protected continuously. Every change to a protected object is stored in the repository. |
90 days
Reduced to 30 days
Reduced to 2 weeks |
| Hourly |
During the Hourly stage, the most current data for each hour is protected. |
4 weeks |
| Daily |
During the Daily stage, the most current data for each day is protected. |
12 weeks |
| Weekly |
During the Weekly stage, the most current data for each week is protected. |
2 weeks |
| End-of-Life |
Data in the End-of-Life stage is permanently deleted from the repository |
Redeployment
The initial deployment of TimeData at Kilpatrick Stockton worked well. However, the IT Department discovered that the high volume of data generated by their Exchange servers caused the TimeData Repository Server to use most of the available network resources. The issue was a result of not using a dedicated network segment. The corrective option that Kilpatrick Stockton pursued was to redeploy TimeData with a repository server at each geographic location. Now, with the introduction of TimeData bandwidth throttling, the most efficient remediation effort to control network use by the TimeData Repository Server is to schedule bandwidth throttling in the TimeSpring Management Console.
User Experience
Although Kilpatrick Stockton has not yet announced their TimeData deployment to the firm, Carol reports that the attorneys and staff regularly request recovery of an individual email or an entire mailbox.
Carol says, “People are very surprised that they can get their data back that quickly. We use TimeData to recover data from weeks ago or 10 minutes ago. It’s such a smooth process. We restore their data in a matter of minutes.”
“We had a TimeSpring Consultant here onsite for a couple days when we first purchased the product to get everything installed and configured, then we were on our way,” reports Carol. “As for the product, it’s an easy and simple solution that yields such a high value.”
The IT engineers at Kilpatrick Stockton say that there is little to no ramp-up for learning how to use the TimeData product because the interface is intuitive. “It works. It’s helped us when we needed it,” says Matt McKinley, Service Manager of the Infrastructure Team at Kilpatrick Stockton. “About five or six months ago, we had a corrupt Exchange store that we restored using TimeData.”
First-Rate Support Service
“When we have needed product support, we have found TimeSpring to be very responsive, definitely a vendor that has a customer focus,” says Carol.
Kilpatrick Stockton takes advantage of the free Virtual Admin service that TimeSpring offers with all TimeData products. The Virtual Admin service is an option that can be activated during installation. The service sends automatic email notification of system anomalies, such as an unusual spike in repository data volume, to a TimeSpring Customer Service professional. When a notification is received, Customer Service researches the information and informs the IT engineers at Kilpatrick Stockton about any potential problems and the recommended course of action.
June 8, Joe Saikali, Senior Technical Support Specialist at TimeSpring Software, received notification from the Virtual Admin service that the TimeData Repository Server was receiving an abnormally high volume of data to process. Joe contacted the IT Department at Kilpatrick Stockton to notify them of a potential problem. It was discovered that the increase in volume was a direct result of a new application that Kilpatrick Stockton was deploying throughout their IT environment. The IT engineers at Kilpatrick Stockton and Joe worked together to modify TimeData configuration settings. The modifications reduced the volume of data being received by the repository server without compromising data protection and without interrupting the deployment of the new application.
Cost Savings
The bottom line at Kilpatrick Stockton is top performance. Implementing TimeData has resulted in an estimated 94% cost savings related to data retrieval. The IT team calculated the net savings for a mailbox restore before and after their TimeData deployment.
“Before TimeData, a restore may have cost us $4700, assuming a 16-hour recovery time based on the average billing rate. But with TimeData CDP, the cost of the same recovery was estimated to be $293 and a maximum of one hour of downtime. This equals a savings of about $4400 or 93.8 percent,” says Carol.
“We also projected the potential cost of a catastrophic data loss event for one of our offices. The cost of a 16-hour data loss would exceed $1 million. Clearly, the direct savings to be gained from TimeData is significant. If we look at our return on investment, the savings are off the charts.”
Final Assessment
“The TimeData solution is incredible. The capability to go back and recover objects with such ease is a fantastic technology that provides great value. You wonder, ‘How did they make it so simple?’” says Carol.
About TimeSpring Software
Capitalizing on its technology patents, TimeSpring Software provides continuous data protection with innovative Zero Data Loss technology. TimeSpring's award-winning software TimeData®, the TimeSpring flagship product, automatically captures all changes to application data in real-time, making it possible to recover from loss, corruption or security breaches within minutes. Additionally, TimeData makes it easy to analyze, report and test using real data at any time without impacting operations. TimeData is easy to implement, easy to use and cost-effective. Founded in 1994, TimeSpring is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
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