PST Management

Solving PST headaches – with or without Archiving…

The reasons that drive users to create and use PST files are well understood (Mailbox Quotas, the Outlook AutoArchive feature) and the reasons why those PST files are a problem in organizations, namely:-

They are seldom under a suitable backup regime and are notoriously unstable, becoming corrupt when reaching over 2GB in size
PSTs are scattered on servers, laptops and desktops resulting in high cost of maintenance and recovery
PST content is not easily discoverable, they are rarely under a company compliance policy, yet remain a high risk to corporate liability

While many vendors have advised ‘archiving’ as the only solution, C2C offers separate tools that enable users to manage PST files depending on their needs and circumstances. With tens or hundreds of thousands of PSTs, we do not believe it is realistic to provide one option. The C2C options are:

Discover PSTs, then
Live with PSTs or
Eliminate PSTs

The decision to either live with or eliminate them is determined by the severity of the problem and the compliance risk posed by the PST files.

Why do organizations live with PSTs?
For some organizations, PST files may not be a cause for concern or the scale of an email archiving project to eliminate PSTs may be too great. Time and budget constraints are always a key consideration, at least until the scale of the problem has been researched. As a result, specific or all PSTs are kept out of necessity to ensure their content can be found and secured.

In the short term, the scale and complexity of the problem can be understood using PST Manager. This enables planning for the longer term or solves the immediate need, for example: