Every month or two I see a long-winded article extolling the coming, imminent, or passed point in which email is dead. Each of these articles list a different medium that has replaced email as the predominate method of intraoffice or inter company communication and extolls the virtue of that tool. Despite all these claims, email is very much alive and a huge part of how all companies big and small conduct business.
Most companies have now decided to take the jump to Office 365 and allow Microsoft to relinquish control of their mail services for a monthly premium. Despite all that movement, we still see a huge number of companies who are holding onto the Exchange platform with both hands to stay in the driver’s seat of the flow of communication within their business. There’s no right or wrong, it really does come down to individual preference, however, the vast majority who still have in-house Exchange have a regular need for Message Level Restore. And that’s where we come in…
Rubrik has provided an open-source script based on the Rubrik Powershell module started by Chris Wahl, Rubrik’s technical evangelist. The script vastly simplifies the process for preparing the Exchange data for investigations by digital forensics companies, such as Kroll, but still requires a level of knowledge, access, and capability outside of the realm the delegated user typically has.
Enter the Assured Data Protection Mail UI tool…
Here at Assured DP we realised there was a clear gap in the market, there needed to be something to make this process easier. So we gathered a sample set of customers who perform regular recoveries of Exchange messages to understand their pain point and assess what areas in the process could be improved. The feedback from those discussions were key features like: remembering credentials, setting a date range for snapshots, and providing feedback on the process.
We started with the logic behind the existing Powershell scripts and then developed a brand new UI platform from scratch leveraging the flexible NodeJS development language. Created from that effort was an application that is built to run on any underlying OS, or hosted through a webform, and enables a user to access the available Exchange snapshots on the Rubrik platform, filtered by date, and then make that snapshot available. The application caches the configuration and credentials provided by an IT administrator, removing the requirement to provide the delegated user the ability to access systems beyond their skill level. Once the user has completed recovering or searching through the mailboxes, un-mounting the snapshot through the Assured application is as easy as a click to unmount.
The UI has been greatly received with many of our existing customers taking full advantage of the new integration, simplifying how they work with Exchange, here’s what they have to say:
“Message Level Restore is a critical component of our backup solution. When evaluating new products, lack of MLR is an immediate disqualifier. When we were introduced to Rubrik we immediately fell in love with the many improvements over our existing solution. Combining digital forensics companies, such as Kroll, with Rubrik delivered the necessary MLR functionality, but with a burdensome amount of configuration and credential use. The Assured DP MLR UI makes the process much easier and puts the function of message level recovery in the hands of the right level of administrator without introducing the potential of a security breach by exposing key credentials. We find ourselves using the function more frequently thanks to the UI’s ease of use.”
As we can see, the simplified integration is definitely a benefit to many of our existing customers. Making back up simple is what we do, offering Rubrik as a service is the integral part but creating even simpler solutions and more benefits is why our service and offering is exceptional.
To find out more download the Message Level Restore data sheet now.
