Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Watch Your Blind Side

Like Nick, I love college and pro football (despite being in 8^th place in my fantasy league right now) so hopefully you don’t mind me indulging in some football analogies tonight. Dean recently blogged about the pitfalls of archiving solutions that won’t let you take your data with you when you change platforms (for the record, that’s most archiving solutions right now). I call it the “Blind Side” effect in archiving – you’ve done all your due diligence on moving to a new email platform and right as you go to throw the project’s winning touchdown – BAM! Out of nowhere, it hits you like a ton of bricks (I’m thinking  Refrigerator Perry here) – you want to move your email to the cloud, but your archive can’t go with you. Or you want to move to a new on-premise platform that isn’t supported by your existing archive.

The good news is that now we’ve got your archiving blind side - think of us like Dan Dierdorf. Not sure what you are going to do with your email platform now that Exchange 2010 is available? Still crunching the numbers on whether or not you should move your email to the cloud? We’ve got you covered. Start archiving now and we’ll help you transition from your current solution to a new platform when the time is right.

Play of the week – get a 100 percent portable archive with us and protect your blind side.

With the Money You Could Be Saving ...

My stepdad owns a small manufacturing company in Chicago and he has been dragged into the digital era kicking and screaming for two decades. About ten years ago, he broke down and got email accounts for his management team - he does not like email, nor does he trust it (despite his stepdaughter working at an email company). You can imagine the conversations on that one over the years ... in fact here is my recollection of one of these conversations about a year ago:

Me: Who do you use for email hosting these days? [I'm working at an email company, I need to know this]

Him: [Insert name of Chicago-only hosting company that I can't remember.]

Me: How much are you paying? [anticipated answer: $8-10/mailbox/month]

Him: I'm not sure, about $25 per account per month.

Me: [I try to hide my shock - but can't help myself. I am stunned.] Why are you using this company and paying that much?

Him: They are local. If there's a problem, I can go and knock on their door.

Me: [Speechless plus this is a debate I will lose]

But thankfully, I am speechless no more! I have a solution for him and lots of other businesses who want to have a contingency plan if their cloud email provider (or on-premise mail server) has a hiccup. Last week we announced enhancements to our CloudMerge technology that give users of cloud-based email, like my stepdad, peace of mind by ensuring 24-7-365 availability of their email, whether their primary email solution fails or during a planned migration. You can think of it like Geico for your email (or a standby mailbox if you're tech'y) - you can use our technology to send and receive messages via our archive, regardless of the status of your primary email platform.

So there it is - I don't have to hear about $25 email hosting at Thanksgiving this year. Stephen - with the money I'm saving you, I think it's pizza time for us at Lou Malnati's.

Freedom of Choice … It’s a Beautiful Thing!

Have you ever moved only to discover that your current service providers don't serve your new neighborhood? (I have - more than once - and it's an extremely frustrating experience!) Instead of simply taking your services with you, you are forced to start from scratch, often foregoing features you once enjoyed, losing history with a provider, experiencing higher costs, etc. But you have no choice. It's all or nothing.

What I love about our recently announced archiving support for cloud email is the freedom of choice it offers our clients and potential clients. We don't believe in locking you into a solution without any flexibility if your circumstances change. As the old adage goes, change is constant.

But one thing is certain: if you archive your email with LiveOffice, it will still be there, safe and sound, if you need to switch email service providers or decide to move your email to the cloud, as many companies are doing in this day and age. Not only do we support on-premise solutions (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes and Sendmail), but we are also the first email archiving provider to support all the major cloud-based email providers, including Microsoft Exchange Online, Cisco WebEx Mail, Google Apps and Intermedia. And if, for whatever reason, you need to move your email archive in house, we support that, too.

Ah, a collective sigh of relief ...

Microsoft BPOS Sets Sail With LiveOffice’s Archive

Avast, matey! Microsoft has set sail with yet another mighty acronym-BPOS. With recent price cuts and a robust offering for messaging and collaboration, the pieces of eight are aplenty and the grog nectar is flowing freely.

Excuse all this pirate talk. We just had an office movie night and Pirates of the Caribbean was the flick of choice. All things ♫yo ho yo ho♫ aside, we recently announced that we're able to support Microsoft's cloud-based Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). We're pretty excited to have jointly developed a connector hand in hand with Microsoft that integrates with their BPOS environment. This functionality enables our archive to communicate freely with the standard Outlook client as well as Outlook Web Access (OWA). Benefit: even if the message you're looking for is no longer available in your inbox, it's always available in LiveOffice's secure cloud archive.

Read more about our integration with Microsoft BPOS here.

Archiving for Google Apps Premier… CHECK

Giant Google Gallantly Gallops Gingerly Toward Ginormicism. Say that five times fast! (Patent pending on my fabricated word "ginormicism.")

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware of Google's penetration into a market that has been historically dominated by the Microsoft Office suite. Google Apps, in general, has taken noticeable strides (see L.A. Times) in giving Microsoft a run for its money. While this isn't a proverbial David vs. Goliath tale (it's more like Goliath vs. Goliath), it'll sure be interesting to see whether or not Google will continue to trespass deeper into Bill Gates' enterprise territory.

As Google Apps' market share continues to expand (which includes web-based communication, collaboration and security), one thing is clear - there's room in the cloud for more than one hosted enterprise messaging vendor. Ultimately, and as Nick spoke of in a recent post, it all comes down to choice. That's why we've recently announced our hosted archiving technology which fully integrates with Google Apps.

Read more about our CloudMerge technology and our integration with Google Apps here.

You Can't Take It With You

As the adage goes, you can't take it with you when you shuffle off these mortal coils. 

Well, the same is true when it comes to on-premise archiving solutions.  Lately, we've been talking a lot  about our Cloud Ready approach to email archiving. Our basic premise is that you need to start thinking about how your archiving solution can move with you if and when you decide to move your email to the cloud (e.g., Microsoft BPOS, Google Gmail for Business, Cisco WebEx Mail, etc.).

A number of folks have asked - why can't I take it with me?  If you are using an on-premise or appliance-based archiving solution, your archives are not easily portable for a couple of reasons. First off, these solutions require you to install hardware/appliances on-premise. And the cloud-based email providers will not let you install that stuff inside their own data centers.  Secondly, on-premise solutions rely on the MAPI protocols or log shipping which do not work with cloud-based email solutions. With cloud-based archiving solutions, however,  you can archive your email from cloud-based providers if the right connections have been engineered and enabled.

Other folks are looking at cloud-based email solutions which bundle in archiving with their email solutions, but this approach has also been fraught with challenges.  Their archiving solutions generally have limited functionality (e.g.,  don't include Outlook/Lotus Notes/BlackBerry integration or don't have well developed e-Discovery or compliance workflows).  Also, they typically do not support other cloud email solutions so your archiving is inextricably bound to the underlying email solution. This means if Gmail goes down, your archive is down, too. Increasingly, CIOs and IT managers are leery about keeping all of their eggs in one basket. 

Cloud-based email archiving solutions help mitigate these risks and minimize your exposure, plus they give you an independent backup of all your data that lets you send and receive email even if your cloud email provider falls down.  

Isn't it time to liberate your email?

Cisco WebEx Mail? – Yep, We Support That

We here at LiveOffice are pretty passionate about our agnostic approach to email archiving. After all, we support every key email platform out there. Our CEO loves to say (with a huge grin, no less) that we're neutral like Switzerland. I just say that we've got that "Care Bear Stare" - we've formed a ray of love and good cheer for all things email archiving, and our lives just aren't complete unless we share it with one and all.

In that same vein, we've not only added support for the newly announced Cisco WebEx Mail, we've also become their preferred email archiving provider. As the only non-Microsoft solution to offer protocol-level (MAPI and RPC over HTTP/S) support for Microsoft Outlook, we can say without a doubt that Cisco's entry into cloud email will alter the competitive landscape.

As always, we're just pleased to see the continued growth of the cloud as a delivery model. And best of all, we're excited to be a part of it.

Free Your Archive to Work With Cloud-Based Email

When you think about all-time great quotes in movie history, this one from Braveheart certainly has to be in the conversation:

Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM! 

While William Wallace's cause was a lot more important, we at LiveOffice also believe in freedom.

In the spirit, we announced yesterday that we're the first independent email archiving solution to support email archiving and email continuity for all major on-premise and cloud-based email systems.  Now our customers have freedom to move their email wherever they want, knowing that their archive will continue to work.  You can read coverage of our announcement at eWeek, ZDNet and SearchStorage.

If you follow the messaging world, you've probably seen the huge amount of activity and interest in cloud email recently, including:

• Gartner Group predicting the percentage of business mailboxes that are hosted soaring from 1%  to 20% by 2012.
• Microsoft predicting that 50% of Exchange mailboxes will be cloud-based in the next five years.
• Google winning the huge project to modernize email for the City of Los Angeles.
• Microsoft dropping pricing for its Exchange Online service to $60/user/year, making it very competitive with Google's $50/user/year price point.
• Cisco announcing its new cloud-based, Microsoft Outlook-compatible Cisco WebEx Mail service.
• Microsoft releasing the long-awaited Exchange 2010
• Independent provider Intermedia becoming the first cloud provider to offer hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010.

And that was all in the last few weeks!

As I speak with customers in my travels, the interest in cloud-based email is off the charts, as customers look to benefit from the economics, scale and focus of providers like the ones above.

At the same time, clients have a number of concerns including:

• Legal/Compliance: How do I ensure retention, discovery and compliance best practices if my email is in the cloud.
• Reliability: What if my provider goes down?  What if they lose my data?
• Lock-In: What if I don't like my provider and want to switch?  What if I want to bring it in-house?
  

We see archiving as a great way to address all three of these concerns:

• Freedom: With a cloud-based archive that supports cloud-based email systems, you are free to address your legal/compliance issues no matter where your email resides.
• Backup: A cloud-based archive, properly setup, can also act as an insurance policy for cloud-based email.  It becomes a backup of all of your email data, so your eggs aren't all in one basket.  In addition, some cloud-based archives offer email continuity, allowing you to send and receive from the archive if the email provider is down or unavailable.
• Portability: Since the cloud-based archive has a second copy of your data, you are now able to switch email providers with ease, knowing you control your data. You now have leverage over your provider.

In this spirit, we announced that we were the first email archiving provider to support all major cloud-based email platforms, including:

• 123Together
• AppRiver
• Apptix
• Azaleos
• Cisco WebEx Mail
• Google Apps (Premier)
• groupSPARK
• Intermedia
• Microsoft Exchange Online
• PanTerra Networks
• USA.NET
• Yahoo! Zimbra
• Other POP/IMAP-based solutions
• Personal Email Accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail)

You can learn more here or by watching our snappy video on the functionality. 

Also please join us for our webinar, tomorrow, Thursday, November 12, 2009 @ 10:30 AM PT where Brian Babineau from analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group and I will discuss the trend toward cloud-based email and its impact on archiving.

We'll have a ton more to share in the coming days about the details of our integrations, some of the benefits customers are already seeing and where we go from here.

Now I'm going to call Mel Gibson to see if he wants to be our spokesperson...

Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Cloud Archive With Exchange 2010

If you're a messaging geek like me, you know Microsoft announced Exchange 2010 General Availability today.  Major releases from Microsoft don't come too frequently, but when they do, they have a big impact.

Read Microsoft executive Rajesh Jha's very personal and eloquent blog post on the Exchange 2010 release to see some great customer quotes about how Exchange 2010 has helped businesses already, such as this one from Bank of America SVP Allan Tagg:

"We're always moving users around. We've been doing that with custom scripts in Exchange Server 2003, but we will definitely be using the Online Move Mailbox feature in 2010. Now we can move them without taking the mailbox offline." 

Overall, Exchange 2010 is huge for the industry.  Congrats to Microsoft on continuing to push the bar on innovation.

You may remember that with our pure software-as-a-service approach to email archiving, we were able to announce Exchange 2010 support on September 1, 2009.

And while Exchange 2010 claims some limited archiving functionality, I encourage customers to look below the surface to understand what they are getting.

Indeed, you can read this excellent review of Exchange 2010 by Joel Snyder at Network World, including this critique of the archiving functionality:

Personal archiving

Joel says: Thumbs down...for now.

With Enterprise licensing, you can enable a personal archive for any user, which creates a twin mailbox in the same message store. Users can drag-and-drop mail there, or Exchange rules can move it there automatically based on policy. Intended as a replacement for those PST files that users seem to keep creating, and losing, the archive doesn't make much sense as long as it has to be stored in the same mailbox database as the original mailbox -- which it does in this release of Exchange. When that limitation is lifted and you can give users tons of slow, cheap storage for e-mail archiving, this'll be a thumbs-up.

So without further ado, here's our highly-self-serving but nonetheless true list of reasons you need a cloud archive with Exchange 2010:

10: No Single Instance Storage (SIS): To achieve the storage optimization for Exchange 2010, Microsoft was forced to disable the already-limited SIS capabilities in previous versions of Exchange.  This means you'll be using up even more disk for that 100th version of the same 20 MB corporate PowerPoint presentation!

9: Requires Enterprise license: While Exchange 2010 may advertise "built-in" archiving, the functionality requires that you have the Enterprise version of the license, creating extra expense for most customers.

8: Requires Outlook 2010: In the same theme, the supposedly "free" functionality requires that customers upgrade to Outlook 2010.  Obviously desktop app upgrades are a big (and costly) deal for most companies.

7: E-Discovery workflow is awkward: Customers that use Exchange 2010 for E-Discovery will be surprised to know that search results from a discovery have to be exported to an Exchange mailbox, versus the normal route of exporting them to the file system.  This means that if you have a big discovery request with 100s of GBs of data, you'd better clear up some server space!  In addition, because Exchange 2010 doesn't provide a cloud-based archive, your outside counsel or other external partners can't easily collaborate on E-Discovery.

6: No SEC/FINRA email compliance: If you are a customer that has requirements around storing email on immutable storage (known as WORM storage) or supervising email for policy violations, you will still need a third-party archiving system.

5: Your email can't go down: Exchange 2010 has significantly enhanced the redundancy of the Exchange platform.  However, whether its because of power issues, network issues or data center issues, your email service is still vulnerable and for most Exchange administrators, that's scary.   Some cloud-based archiving solutions provide the added benefit of built-in email continuity, ensuring you can send and receive messages even if your internal email server is unavailable.

4: No backup/restore optimization: One of the biggest drivers for email archiving in the early days wasn't around compliance, discovery or anything so business-oriented.  Customer email databases were getting too big and backups were taking too long.  This meant backups were overrunning stated windows and restores were becoming impractical.  Unfortunately Exchange 2010 archiving keeps archived data in the same email database as primary data, despite the fact that it's not changing anymore.  This means your backups continue to grow and grow.  In contrast, with a cloud-based archiving solution, you can keep your primary databases (and related backups) small and offload older data to the cloud.

3: Still in storage business: In that same vein, fundamentally, with Exchange 2010, you are still in the business of buying and managing storage to meet your users' ever-growing demands.  That means more vendor meetings, more procurement, more money and more scaling issues.  And since all of the data needs to live in the same storage device for primary and archived mailboxes, this means more expensive storage, even for data that's never used.  In contrast, with a cloud-based archive, you never have to buy storage again, unless you really want to!

2: Unpredictable costs: Netting it all out, with the backup complexities and growing storage environment, Exchange 2010 archiving means you are still in the same world of having to guess where you email usage will be in a few years and size accordingly.  Guess low and you end up having scaling issues.  Guess high and you wasted money.  In contrast, a cloud-based archive gives you predictable, flat costs with unlimited storage, so you don't have to worry.

1: Lock you out of the cloud: Finally, customers will choose third-party cloud-based archives because they are also looking at moving email to the cloud - with Microsoft or possibly with Google, Cisco, Intermedia or a host of other vendors.  Needless to say, Exchange 2010 archiving would lock them out of that flexibility.

 

Cisco Acquires Cloud-Based Web Security Provider ScanSafe for $183 Million

We have a lot of respect for peers of ours in other cloud computing categories.  In particular, ScanSafe has been an innovator in the cloud-based web security space for a long time.

Today, Cisco's security business unit announced they are acquiring ScanSafe for $183 million.

"With the acquisition of ScanSafe, Cisco is executing on our vision to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services for advanced security enforcement," said Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit (STBU). "Cisco will provide customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best suits their organization and deliver anytime, anywhere protection against Web-based threats."

I've met with Tom Gillis at Cisco before and he's an impressive leader.  Between the amazing success IronPort has had and the new acquisition of ScanSafe, it seems like Cisco is doing well in the cloud security space.

Congrats to Cisco and the ScanSafe team.  Seems like a good fit for both and more validation of cloud computing in general.