Symantec Releases Enterprise Vault 10 for Social Media Archiving, Data Tracking

By David Roe (@druadh20) Aug 3, 2011

We flagged earlier in the year that Symantec (news, site) would be releasing a new version of Enterprise Vault with social media archiving and more effective data tracking. Symantec has announced the release of Enterprise Vault 10, which comes with these new features and a lot more.

Managing Unstructured Data

In terms of information management, this is really a significant release for Symantec, not just because of the social media archiving, but also because it also recently announced closure on the Clearwell deal, which adds the advantage of processing social information for e-Discovery purposes.

It shouldn’t have to be said here how important tracking information is, but this year’s AIIM State of the ECM Industry report suggests that many enterprises are still struggling with managing what data they have, let alone the data that is being created on a daily basis through social media.

And then there’s the regulatory climate we all labor under and the consequent need to keep that information under wraps, even if it’s only to avoid some nasty fines.

And it is in this space that Symantec has introduced Enterprise Vault 10. Of the new release, Brian Dye, VP of product management at Symantec, said:

Businesses have learned how important it is to protect and preserve email, IM, documents, spreadsheets and other unstructured information, and they're learning that the same is true for social media records…We’ve increased the scale and performance of Enterprise Vault so our customers can effectively archive and e-Discover the millions of records employees are creating by email, social media, SharePoint and file systems.

And that in a nutshell — well, a paragraph anyway — is what Enterprise Vault 10 does. Specifically, that comes in the shape of email and content archiving along with data loss prevention functionality that enables enterprises to analyze Exchange email and content as well as its metadata.

All are assigned the appropriate archiving and retention policies and can be flagged for compliance procedures, and can do the same for all social media-generated content.

Enterprise Vault 10

There are two particular areas that are worth taking note of, even if there is functionality here that is too large to be listed in a post.

Data Classification

The Data Classification Service feature of Enterprise Vault 10 uses Symantec’s Data Loss technology to classify email and apply filters to speed the archiving and retention policy.

As a result, they can also be used in the e-Discovery process. This is also tied to Symantec’s encryption technology, which means encrypted information can also be stored, and, more important, found.

Social Media Archiving

In addition is the ability to archive content that is posted to publicly facing blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, which is a good thing, given that a lot of that information now falls under regulations such as FINRA.

But even leaving that aside, the amount of customer information that can be gleaned from this kind of content is invaluable, with the result that, according to Symantec, 82% of enterprises are now looking at introducing some kind of technology to help them with this.