Bremen Airport, annually welcoming around 2.6 million passengers, leverages its prime location just a few kilometers south of the city center, offering unmatched connectivity. From the heart of the vibrant Hanseatic city, you're never far from taking off.

For Bremen Airport GmbH and its approximately 450 employees, accessibility, fail-safety, and reliability aren't just about air traffic. They're the backbone of their IT systems, too. For years, the company has been harnessing virtualization and thin client technology, primarily to run standard business systems. Additionally, dedicated servers are rolled out for specialized operations.

Compliance Alert: Email Archiving Needs a Revamp

Internal audits revealed a critical need to overhaul email archiving strategies.

"Until recently, our email was solely stored on our Exchange server," says Oliver Hoffmeyer, IT Director at Bremen Airport GmbH. "Employees could create quasi-independent local archives using PST files, but this method lacked a holistic archiving approach. This setup didn’t give us any way to ensure all sent and received email was archived in a compliant, automated manner."

A Special Eye on Workers' Rights

In navigating the complex challenge of email archiving, Bremen Airport's IT leadership made a strategic move early on by involving employee representatives in the conversation. This proactive approach ensured sensitive issues, particularly concerning private email messages, were handled with care, avoiding any friction or unease among the staff. The goal was clear: to distinguish private email messages from work-related ones, exempting the former from long-term archiving while ensuring a comprehensive and seamless storage of all business-critical communications.

When scouring the market in 2012 for a fitting email archiving solution, Bremen Airport prioritized legal compliance and auditability to meet stringent regulatory demands. Other key selection criteria included ease of use, clarity, and technical robustness. ARTEC IT Solutions' EMA system stood out, proving superior in technical capabilities and meeting all specified requirements during the evaluation phase.

Handling Private Email with Care

EMA's robust functionality particularly shone through in addressing employee representatives’ concerns, offering unparalleled privacy protections. Through attribute assignments, EMA allows for tailored handling of private email correspondence in alignment with workers' councils and employee representatives. Bremen Airport, for instance, leverages EMA's feature to tag email messages as "private", making them visible to administrators only under strict dual-approval protocols. Additionally, the system supports automatic synchronization of private email folders with the archive, ensuring any local client actions reflect immediately in the archive.

The EMA solution, appliance-based, was swiftly implemented and operationalized. It automatically archives both incoming and outgoing staff email messages, preserving them in their original format with electronic signatures and timestamps. This ensures email messages remain unaltered over time, bolstering legal and audit compliance. ARTEC's sophisticated security framework, which keeps the decryption "key" with the customer regardless of where data is stored, further heightens the protection of sensitive company data.

Boosting Convenience with Advanced Full-Text Search

Beyond meeting legal requirements, Bremen Airport's IT team aimed to relieve system resources through archiving and make retrieving email faster and more efficient. Oliver Hoffmeyer shares the outcome:

"Our employees particularly enjoy the significant convenience and speed in searching and retrieving old email," says Hoffmeyer. "What used to be a time-consuming process is now accomplished in seconds with full-text search capabilities by simply entering keywords. This easy, hassle-free access to needed email messages is highly valued by our team. We are currently exploring ways to address some unique needs arising from our collaboration with employee representatives. Given EMA's versatility, we're confident we can tackle these challenges as well."