Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

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 ...

Are You Risking Compliance in an “Unsecure” Cloud?

Two of the biggest concerns about cloud services are data control and security. While these are both very valid concerns, the security fear is also unsubstantiated (some vendors do have questionable practices about data ownership, but LiveOffice believes that every KB to TB of data belongs to its clients, and they can get it back whenever they want). Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or cloud, providers actually have some of the most advanced equipment and technologies on the market - much more high-end systems and safeguards than the majority of companies can afford on premise. After all, this is their livelihood. If they aren't experts at securing the data they store, they won't be around for very long.

Compliance goes hand in hand with these issues, but data stored on a vendor's servers is vulnerable to the same threats as data stored on your own servers. The important thing to note is that the best service providers are well equipped to deal with these challenges and minimize risk. Ultimately, they can do it more effectively than you can.

While there will always be naysayers, some feel that security is best left to the cloud. "SaaS is tailor made for keeping up with the rapid pace of malware development," says Cody Leser, senior director of channel sales at Trend Micro. "There's no way to push patch files continuously; you have to do it in the cloud."

Todd Fitzwater, principal at Demand Solutions Group, says, "Your data is actually getting taken care of in [service providers'] data center[s] better than in yours. The backup and recovery, disaster recovery and security around the servers is much tighter and higher grade than you would put in your own data center."

As with any major decision, companies need to do their due diligence and ask questions - lots of them. Where is the data being stored? What security measures are in place at each data center? Are the data centers redundant? Are the data centers monitored 24-7-365? What type of encryption is being used to protect data in transit? What type of infrastructure is being used to host the data? What type of spam-and-virus protection is in place? Can the data centers handle a sudden increase in demand? How often is data backed up and where are backups stored? Does the service provider enlist an independent, third-party vendor to conduct periodic security scans and other checks? What happens in the event of downtime or a disaster? What happens if the company decides to move its data elsewhere? What happens if the service provider goes out of business or sells to another company?

In the end, you need to make sure you are comfortable with the answers you receive. If there is any doubt about the security of your data, it's probably time to talk to another service provider.

Hybrids: On-premise and Cloud-based Email Archiving with Mimosa

As some folks know, I previously spent several years in the on-premise email archiving industry.  And while I'm now an unabashed fanboy of cloud-based technologies, I've been in both worlds long enough to realize that each model has its trade offs.

On-premise archives provide a number of unique benefits including:

• Tight integration with internal systems
• Complete control for IT
• Archiving of other internal content sources beyond email (e.g., file servers)

In contrast, cloud-based email archiving offers:

• Limitless storage and indexing leveraging the economies of scale of the cloud
• Flat, predictable pricing
• Secure, external access for reviewers

Many customers gravitate fully to one camp or the other.  But we are seeing an increasing number of clients interested in achieving the best of both worlds to address a couple of key challenges:

• Managing cost to store an ever growing volume of email driven by longer and longer retention periods
• Automating export and review of responsive content to parties outside of the company 

To this end, today we announced the BETA availability of LiveOffice CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint, an integration with our friends at leading email archiving vendor Mimosa Systems.

CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint automatically pushes some or all of the data from the on-premise NearPoint email archive to LiveOffice's secure cloud-based archive on a regular basis.

This integration, detailed here, gives customers two key benefits.

Benefit 1: Tiered Storage to the Cloud

Older email messages can be aged off of the on-premise archive and stored securely in LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive.  In this way, the cost and size of the on-premise archive storage can be capped while maintaining easy access to your content, thereby:

• Providing an alternative to new on-premise storage purchases
  
• Automating migration of data between storage platforms as data ages in the archive
  
• Leveraging the unlimited storage pricing model of LiveOffice's archive

Benefit 2: Secure, Open Review through the Cloud

A subset of records can be transferred securely from the on-premise archive to LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive.  This eliminates the need for manual exports and shipments from the on-premise archive and allows outside counsel, legal partners or any outside reviewer to search and iterate on a subset of the data in the archive.

For example, imagine that I receive an e-discovery request from outside counsel. Without this solution, I would have to spend time manual exporting the initial data set and copying it to a DVD before shipping it to the requestor. There would likely be subsequent requests to modify the search criteria so I'd have to repeat the export and shipping process again and again. But CloudMerge changes that process entirely. Now, I'm able to seamlessly move each desired data set from the NearPoint archive to the LiveOffice archive on-demand. The requestor is provided with a login and password and is able to access the data set almost instantly (without ever gaining access to my network) and perform their own customized searches.  

For more, please check out this page.

Huge thanks to our partners at Mimosa Systems for their collaboration on this venture.