Proofpoint Inc has released the Proofpoint Enterprise Archive Content Collection option for the Proofpoint Enterprise Archive cloud archiving solution – this extends Proofpoint’s eDiscovery and legal hold capabilities beyond email to a wide variety of documents, located anywhere across the extended enterprise. Highly targeted content collection capabilities rapidly and accurately identify content – stored in repositories including desktop and mobile hard drives, shared drives, removable drives and Microsoft SharePoint –and enable organizations to easily manage and enforce legal holds on that content regardless of where it is initially located in the organization.
Proofpoint say the ability to locate and collect distributed content is significant to enterprise legal and IT organizations for two reasons:
• In today’s distributed world, content that may be relevant to eDiscovery resides not only in conventional, structured systems like e-mail, instant messaging and SharePoint, but also increasingly on social media, unmanaged share drives, external file sharing services and individual laptops, smart phones and tablets. Comprehensive search capabilities that extend beyond email and IM are therefore crucial.
• Unless eDiscovery searches are targeted, they produce large volumes of documentation which must be stored and then manually sorted, a slow and costly process. Also, a broad eDiscovery search puts the company at risk of exposing documents that can be detrimental to the legal objectives of the search. With Proofpoint Enterprise Archive Content Collection, in conjunction with Proofpoint Enterprise Governance, only relevant documents and files are pulled into the archive.
Agents on the Alert
The Content Collection option works in conjunction with Proofpoint Enterprise Governance agents, which are installed at one or more location on the enterprise network, often with specific tasks such as monitoring content stored in repositories such as share drives, Sharepoint or even single laptops. The agents monitor document flow and communicate with Proofpoint’s cloud-based intelligence, which maintains an overall understanding of each document’s history and attributes such as size, age, creator, custodian, type, date modified locations/folder names, and others.
When an administrator issues a collection order, e.g. for all MS Word documents John Smith touched between April 3 and May 16, 2012, the agents copy all relevant files to an intake location specified to the Content Collection module, which submits them to Proofpoint’s Enterprise Archive with appropriate legal hold specification. All documents are encrypted, and can be searched using any of the attributes listed above. When a hold ends, the files are then disposed from the Archive, ensuring compliance with legal policy.
Pricing and Availability
The Content Collection option for Proofpoint Enterprise Archive is scheduled to be available in the next 30 days. Pricing for Proofpoint Enterprise Archive with the Content Collection module is based on aggregate storage capacity per year. Contact Proofpoint for details at www.proofpoint.com