Building on a Cloud Strategy

Construction Company Future-Proofs its Email Records by Moving to the Cloud

Since its inception in 1938 Linbeck has become a national construction company renowned for applying lean operating principles throughout the design and construction phases of a building project. It has invested over $3 billion in projects for both corporations and commercial developers.

The Houston-based company provides construction services using Lean Operating System and TeamBuild concepts to combine information from designers, project managers, operations and maintenance personnel, technical experts and end-users. In the last 10 years, Linbeck has been included in the top three “Builders of Cultural Projects” and has become the top builder to integrate project delivery (IPD).

Over the past 6 years, Linbeck had been archiving all its email correspondence using EMC’s EmailXtender. The company needed to store this data for use in daily business operations and in the event of any litigation situations. This archiving practice additionally allows them to conform to the Texas statute that requires construction agencies to retain their emails for 12 years.

In the later part of 2013, the decision was made to migrate to Symantec’s Enterprise Vault.cloud.

The move was driven by the following factors:

1. Future Support – EmailXtender was end-of-life and would not support versions of Microsoft Exchange any later than 2003.
2. Ongoing Cost – the large amount of space required to store archives was becoming expensive to maintain.
3. Cloud Strategy – the hosted email journaling and eDiscovery services offered by Symantec was highly attractive.

To move its legacy archives into the cloud, Linbeck chose to use Transvault Migrator with services from Symantec expert and Transvault Master Certified partner, US-Amplify.

The company’s strong archiving expertise and long-standing industry track-record meant there was no question that US-Amplify would be the best option to entrust with their company’s email archive migration.

To make the transition as easy as possible, US-Amplify worked closely with Linbeck to outline the course of their migration. Experts at US-Amplify then used TransVault Migrator to extract the data into the format required by Enterprise Vault.cloud.

A total of 1.6TB of archived journal data from EmailXtender was extracted in just a few days.

For Linbeck, chain-of-custody reports were absolutely mandatory for compliance reasons.

According to Joseph Whitmore, practice lead at US-Amplify,

 

A key feature that attracted Linbeck was the detailed chain-of-custody reporting that would be provided at the end of the migration. This is an important feature in any migration project as it maintains the integrity of the data from one platform to another and helps prove the data stored in the source archive is the same upon reaching the destination archive, and that nothing has been omitted.

Although the migration team at US-Amplify were prepared for any environmental issues that could have caused delays, the migration process went very smoothly. Transvault Migrator has the ability to optimize extraction and ingestion speeds, so that there is minimal impact on end users during a migration. Linbeck saw the whole picture: the chain-of-custody reports, the expertise of US-Amplify, the speed of migration and the general process efficiency. The benefits to their company were instantly recognizable.