Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and migrations

TheRegister reportedthat EMC is shutting down its main (Belgium) development center for its archive storage offering, the EMC Centera. 

While EMC denies that this means the end of life for EMC Centera, it's certainly made a number of EMC archive customers nervous:

Taken together, these executive moves and the closing of the Mechelen Centera development center suggest that the Centera product could be approaching its end of life. 

So what does a customer do when their archive storage is EOLed?  They are forced to find a new storage vendor and migrate all of that data (often terabytes worth) to the new platform.  For cash and time-strapped IT departments, this can means hundreds of thousands of dollars of unplanned cost and hundreds of hours of unplanned time. 

And the fact is that since most customer keep archive data 3, 5, 7 years or more, they will eventually be forced to migrate their data - whether because a vendor EOLs its products or because they need to upgrade to newer storage.

I think this is one of the significant yet subtle benefits of software-as-a-service for email archiving.  Clients can be rest assured that their data is always available at a predictable monthly cost without worrying about moving it around constantly.

So EMC Centera customers, we're glad to bail out your Centera with our TARP program.

TARP: A bailout plan for failed on-premise email archives

The holidays are coming up and it's a time for giving.  Lord knows that the world needs some giving these days.

Our government is taking the lead this season with the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the artist formerly known as the "bailout plan."

And as the Feds rescue Wall Street, Main Street, bridges to nowhere and Joe the Plumber, we want do our part.

All right, I'll stop kidding around.  We just thought TARP was a convenient acronym that could describe what we're up to at LiveOffice.

As I've told friends countless times, on-premise email archives are great and have tons of functionality. Software offerings like Symantec Enterprise Vault successfully power email archives for many large organizations across the world.

Unfortunately not every customer realizes the effort (in terms of time, trouble and Total Cost of Ownership) involved in successfully deploying and managing on-premise email archives.  For the large customers with the budget and IT staff to handle them, in-house solutions are an excellent fit.

On the other hand, I've spoken with countless customers of on-premise email archiving vendors who didn't realize what they got themselves into and ended up with one of the following:

• Shelfware - an undeployed archive (often because they couldn't muster the budget or resources to get the hardware and adjacent technology setup to power the archive).
  
• "Mal"ware - an archive that just can't stay up and running.
• Nowhere - hundreds of thousands of dollars spent with the same growing email stores, PST/NSF proliferation and manual e-Discovery searches as before.

To reiterate, I firmly believe that these failed deployments are not because the software products are bad.  Indeed, I think the products from leading vendors get better each year.  The fact is, however, that a software vendor can only control a part of the customer's environment and many customers are just not equipped to deploy and manage an email archive themselves.

We at LiveOffice believe that SaaS is a great way for organizations with limited IT staff, budget or both to rapidly obtain the benefits of email archiving.

In particular, we believe that customers who tried an on-premise email archive and haven't been able to make it work could benefit from SaaS in a big way.

With that, we're announcing our Troubled Archive Relief Program (TARP), a six-step initiative to help customers with on-premise email archiving deployments that didn't work out migrate to the "cloud."  The key pieces to this program are:

1. A Total Cost of Ownership calculatorto show customers how much they can save moving to a SaaS email archiving solution. 
2. A third-party endorsement of this calculator by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, so you know this wasn't just a vendor making this stuff up. :)
3. A white paper(written by yours truly :) ) on the various management tasks you take on with an on-premise email archive that you don't have to deal with in the SaaS world.
4. A free trialoffer to test out SaaS archiving.  This is pretty neat in that if you have an on-premise archive, you can try our solution out side-by-side and the setup takes literally just a few minutes (configure email journaling to send a copy of your email to our secure data centers).
5. An offer to come visit you and address how the migration would work.  We have a strong staff of professionals with experience in both the SaaS and on-premise email archiving worlds.
6. Data migration services to help you export data quickly and securely out of your existing archive and migrate it to us, in conjunction with archive migration specialist Procedo.

Hopefully the LiveOffice TARP can get email archiving customers back on the path to recovery.

A bailout plan for your Exchange server: Free email continuity

Quick quiz.  What goes up and down in wild swings, often with no explanation?  If you answered the stock market, you're right.  But if you guessed that your internal Exchange server is also prone to volatility, you are correct there as well.

In this spirit, we are announcing LiveOffice Mail Continuity, a completely free "bailout plan" for your internal mail server.

Why Mail Continuity

When we talk to our clients running internal Exchange servers (many of them looking to go to Hosted Exchange 2007), we always ask them what their big pain points are for their Exchange environment.  Obviously email archiving, email compliance and e-Discovery are high on their radar.  But for some customers, simply keeping the email environment up and running is a challenge.

To the end, we recently partnered with Osterman Research, a respected analyst in the email world, to conduct a survey to IT managers on their email needs.  The findings reveal that 50 percent of respondents do not currently have an email continuity solution in place. Of those who say they do, nearly half are relying on tape backups.

Why is this, you may ask?  Everyone knows that email is mission critical, right?  The sad fact is that for most IT departments, there aren't many good alternatives.  They could implement clustering and replication solutions for Exchange, but these are often out of the reach of most IT departments in terms of cost and complexity. 

And why are backups not sufficient?  If you've ever been through an email restore, you know the answers:

• Recovery from backup tapes can take hours, days or weeks.
• During downtime, users have no email service.
• Without business email service, users often resort to using personal email accounts during outages, exposing organizations to security risks, compliance violations and legal liability.
• All data is not recoverable-anything created after the last backup is permanently lost. For example, if backups happen daily, all data between the last day's backup and the outage is unrecoverable.

How Does It Work?

Customers can sign up for free email continuity today.  Once you sign up, one of our messaging experts will contact you to get you setup.  You should be up in running a matter of a few days or less.  You only have to make two changes to your environment:

• Change your DNS "MX" record (the record in DNS that routes your email) to route through LiveOffice's secure, rock-solid data centers.  This allows you to use LiveOffice for email if your internal mail servers are down.
  
• Configure your Exchange server to "journal" (send a copy in the background of) all email to our data centers.

Once you're setup, you have peace of mind, knowing that if your mail server were to fail, your employees can continue with secure, compliant business email during the downtime.

Specifically, if your internal mail server goes down, you simply call us or login to the LiveOffice Mail Continuity administration console to "flip the switch" and have your employees start using LiveOffice for their email temporarily.  

The best thing about it is that employees can continue to use their existing Microsoft Outlook email client.  During downtime, they simply click on a special folder in Outlook.  In that folder, they'll see all of their recent sent and received email and will be able to compose, reply to and forward email just as if their Exchange server was up and running.

When your system is back up internally, simply "flip the switch" back and LiveOffice will automatically forward queued email back to your environment and go back to being your "insurance policy" for your mail server. 

For more details, see our detailed description and our list of Frequently-Asked Questions. 

It Can't Be Free? What's the Catch?

It really is free.  You don't have to buy anything else from us.  I know this feels like one of those cell phone commercials and you're looking for caveats, asterisks and fine print, but you won't find any.

We just are big believers in software-as-a-service email and think that free email continuity is a great way for customers to take a step toward running their email "in the cloud."

In addition, customers that use Mail Continuity are also fully setup for LiveOffice Mail Archive.  If they decide they want to start archiving their email for mailbox management, e-discovery and compliance purposes, they simply can call us, sign up for a plan and start using Mail Archive with no additional setup.

At this price, just think what we could do with $700 billion!