Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Email archiving: A baby step into the cloud

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Since I'm on the theme of Bill Murray movies, my mother-in-law's all-time favorite and one of my personal top picks as well is the 1991 classic What About Bob?

In the movie, where a supposedly-insane Bill Murray (Bob) drives his therapist (Richard Dreyfus) even crazier, Bob learns about a method of therapy involving taking "baby steps" toward challenges.

As you know, there is a ton of hype and some substance around the idea of cloud computing (or XaaS as CIO Insight put it, in a recent article) where companies leverage external infrastructure for applications, rather than building everything themselves.

In this vein, many companies are now looking at their email infrastructure and trying to decide whether to use a hosted service (e.g., Hosted Microsoft Exchange) or continue to run an email service on internal servers.

However, a few companies that I have spoken with struggle with whether they're ready to pull the trigger on outsourcing email altogether.  Some are aggressively moving forward - particularly if they have to upgrade their email infrastructure anyways (e.g., to Microsoft Exchange 2007).

Others are finding an interesting baby step: start by archiving your email to a hosted service provider to:

• Reduce your storage costs and backup windows for email.
• Give your users an Unlimited Mailbox without the need for quotas or PST files.
• Create a searchable repository for e-Discovery and other legal searches.

Archiving is a great way to start in the cloud since it's typically a new project, not core to most businesses, expensive to build internally and surprisingly-complex to run in-house.

Once a company has its email archived with a service provider, a few things happen:

• The company now has experience with the "cloud" and can determine whether to go deeper.
• The company also has its historical email hosted.  If its service provider also provides hosted messaging, a future migration to a fully-hosted email platform is much easier (since the biggest time in an email migration is in copying the data from the old email system to the new one).