Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

An Open Letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger & Other United States Governors:        

It's no secret, times are tough. In light of the current economy, you have to make do with far fewer resources than ever before. At the same time, you still need technologies in place to keep your states running smoothly and in compliance with the multitude of current laws and regulations (FRCP, California Public Records Act, Sunshine Laws). With the ever-growing volumes of email and the critical importance of maintaining it as a government record, your technology departments are struggling with how to keep email systems operating without the funding they need.

We have a solution for you - SaaS email management. With this model, your technology teams can outsource all email-related tasks to an expert vendor, and you only pay for what you need on a monthly basis. The flexibility of SaaS during tough economic times means your technology teams can:

• Add and remove users as needed, without paying for unused accounts or waiting to scale your infrastructure
• Maintain full control of email, while shifting the burden and expense of high network uptime and reliability to an enterprise-class vendor
• Get up and running with fully hosted email and legally compliant archiving in just a matter of days (not months) without disrupting end users

In response to these difficult economic times, we are introducing the LiveOffice Economic Recovery Plan. This program is designed to provide state and local governments as well as educational institutions with an effective solution for managing email systems, while also ensuring that all retention and compliance requirements are seamlessly met. And, to those public sector and non-profit organizations facing uncertainty about your government funding, financing and budgets for this year, we also invite you to signup. The LiveOffice Economic Recovery Plan allows you to take advantage of our SaaS-based email archiving and hosting solutions with no monthly payments until June 1, 2009.*

For more information on this program, please contact one of our Economic Recovery Plan Experts at 800.374.2032.

Respectfully,

Nick Mehta

CEO, LiveOffice

SaaS gets you away from finger-pointing

Technology is definitely never easy and any vendor that tells you otherwise probably has a Brooklyn Bridge to sell you too.

However, one of the big challenges for many IT departments is figuring out which part of their technology stack is to blame for any given issue.  Many customers find hosted email archiving solutions to be attractive because they get "one throat to choke."

Case in point: Check out the recent data loss issues related to the email archiving solution involving EMC Centera hardware and Symantec Enterprise Vault software:

Yet despite EMC's denials and their customers' hesitations to go public with their archiving problems, evidence emergedwhich raised questions about the integrity of EMC's commitment to the integrity of their customers' archives.

... 

In short - when Symantec publicly declares that EMC Centera (and only EMC Centera) is vulnerable to data loss, the entire industry - and most importantly archiving customers need to stand up and listen.

Obviously the main point of the article (from EMC arch-rival NetApp) is to blast EMC for the data loss issue.

But the underlying theme is also interesting.  Is it the hardware?  Is it the software?  As a customer, you just want it to work, so getting stuck in the middle of a vendor blame game isn't helpful.

On-premise email archive indexing nightmares

One of the top reasons for which organizations deploy email archiving solutions is to allow them to find important email when they need it - whether for email discovery, email compliance or simply knowledge management.

Unfortunately, as the billions of dollars in CapEx that Google spends on its search infrastructure proves, searching (and indexing - the process to make searching possible) is easier said than done.

Many customers that try to deploy their own archives often find that the indexes become corrupt (unusable), slow or worse, inconsistent.

For example, witness this thread on a Google Groups forum about Autonomy's Zantaz EAS product:

We have a similar problem. We have been struggling for 8 months to build an idol index. We start building the index from scratch and everything runs at a reasonable pace initially and the idx files are processed. As the index grows the speed at which it processes the idx files slows down considerably, eventually it almost grinds to a halt.

Our vendor has tried various configurations for us over the last 9 months and we have still not succeeded in building a complete index. We have about 21 million docs to index and the best we get too is about 5 million docs indexed.

Quite honestly this product is not doing more for us other than reduce the size of our mailfiles. Even on the archiving side we continually experience cases where users are unable to retrieve archived mails. I could spend time on webbex's with our vendor trying to sort each of these issues out, but there are so many and my perception is that the support from autonomy is
so poor that I do not waste my time anymore, I just restore from tape.

This isn't an issue with Autonomy per-se.  You'll find similar issues for nearly all on-premise products.  The fact is that indexing technology is notoriously-complex:

• You need to make sure that indices have consistent access to high-speed storage.
• You need to make sure that index servers have appropriate RAM and RAM configuration.
• You need to continually scale and add indexing nodes to scale with unpredictable search volume.  Troubleshooting performance is really challenging.
• Even if you have it down to science, you need to figure out how to handle the once-a-year HUGE search without always over-provisioning the system and wasting capacity the rest of the year.
• You need to diagnose missing or inconsistent results if you find them (and you will).
• You need to make sure you have full-time staff who can handle all of the issues above.

In the end, many customers are left like the one above - using the on-premise email archive for mailbox management but not getting the E-Discovery benefits that they originally bought the product for.

Backing Up vs. Archiving: What’s the Diff?

We get this question a lot from IT folks who have faithfully backing up their email for years.  First off, we are not suggesting you stop backing-up.  Far from it. 

Backing up your company data is important from a disaster recovery perspective.  A nice short-term insurance policy. Meaning that should your primary messaging environment (e.g., Exchange) collapse or fall victim to some type of natural or manmade disaster, you will have a copy of it stored safely offsite. 

That's obviously a good thang.

The trouble is some IT folks mistakenly believe that their back-up can also meet their email compliance or legal discovery needs.  But, think about it.  Let's say your company gets sued and the opposing council asks for an email thread involving Amy, your wayward manager prone to fits of rage, and her ex-employee, John, whom she summarily fired three years ago.

If you relied on back-up tapes, you would have to do the following:

1. Search for the old tapes (assuming you hadn't overwritten them)
2. Hope that you could restore the tape (assuming it wasn't corrupted after three years sitting in storage)
3. Try to find the relevant emails related to the case

Since people backup email servers every day, week and month, you don't end up having to restore one tape but often many.  For example, if you backup every day and want all email for a year, it could be 365 tapes.  And once you have all those tapes, you have to de-duplicate because you'll have tons of redundant data.  So, the process of restoring could literally take you weeks if not months

Another pitfall of backup is that you don't end up capturing ALL emails (e.g., data that was created and deleted in same day) because backups often happen just once a day and tapes often miss data sitting in people's laptops (e.g., PST files).

And there's a better than average chance that after all of this, you still won't be able to find the needle in the haystack.  This could cost you big time if the jury thinks you're trying to squash damaging evidence.

Now, let's compare that with an email archiving solution.  What's the difference?

First off, when you archive every email they get indexed and stored in the archive in real-time.  Because they have been indexed, it's easy to find an email based on the sender, the date range, subject line or even keywords in the email body or attachment with just a few clicks.  And perhaps, in the process, you may find that Amy actually had legal grounds to terminate John.

But, there are a few other benefits of archiving that you get as a bonus.

One. By having an email archive, you can reduce the size of your email storage since you can now safely "prune" these stores knowing that they have been securely archived.  Plus, you can now safely reduce the mailbox sizes allocated to your end users.

Two. By pruning your email stores, you can significantly shorten your backup windows (the time it takes to back up all of your email). 

And three. With many archiving solutions, you can even give your end users direct access to their own historical email.  Translation - they can restore their own email in seconds without having to involve YOU!  And in so doing, you can eliminate PSTs (personal email folders typically stored on their desktops) which can be missed during legal discovery and are prone to accidental loss.

Consequently, email archiving allows Exchange administrators to get a handle on some of their most common pains, including exploding email volumes and the daily challenges of backups.  We encourage you to learn more about these differences in our Archiving vs. Backing Up white paper.