Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

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! 

Sarah Palin needs Hosted Exchange

We all know how critical email has become for businesses and for the government.  However, it's striking how many intelligent business people and leaders still use personal email accounts for business purposes, exposing their organizations to security risks, legal issues and compliance violations.

As ABC News reported:

It's not a great idea to run a government using Yahoo! e-mail accounts.

Palin and Yahoo Mail

Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail habit of using a private account to communicate with aides echos the worst practices of the Bush administration, says one expert.

That's the word from experts, anyway, reacting to news that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo! e-mail had been hacked earlier this week. McCain's vice-presidential pick reportedly used the accounts to communicate with key aides about government business.

In addition to the security problems that this story highlights, ABC News points out that messages sent in this manner are also in violation of the spirit of the need to archive and preserve public records:

Lawyer Meredith Fuchs of the Washington, D.C.-based National Security Archive has experience on this issue, having fought with the Bush White House over how it preserved emails, and why it allowed key personnel to use private email accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee. She believes Palin's email habits echo the worst practices of the Bush administration.

Government email systems typically have safeguards to preserve communications specifically for open-records purposes. "I don't know what Yahoo's policy is" on how long it saves emails, particularly after they're deleted by the user, said Fuchs, who doubted they were preserved.

That parallels the problems with White House personnel sending email through the RNC. Many of their emails "just don't exist anymore," said Fuchs. "This is very similar."

Fuchs - and open-government advocates in Alaska - worry that may be part of the governor's intent. "Maybe they did it because they thought the records wouldn't be disclosed," said Fuchs. "That raises issues possible destruction of evidence issues - if they expected litigation."

Organizations sometimes exacerbate this problem inadvertently, driving employees to use personal email.  For example:

• Companies that don't provide remote access to email (e.g., Microsoft Outlook Web Access or Blackberry) often leave employees with no choice but to use personal email while away from the office.
• IT departments that place mailbox quotas (limits) on email often force users to leverage personal email accounts when over their limit.

Obviously email sent this way is then not aligned with company policies around email archiving, compliance or e-Discovery. 

PST skeletons in the closet

Andrew Conry-Murray has a great blog on InformationWeek where he has recently posted some thoughtful articles on email archiving.  Specifically, his latest post talks about PST files and the difference between "official policy" of most companies and the reality.

He points out that most users create PST files today:

Sixty percent of respondents to an InformationWeek survey on e-mail archiving say their users store .pst files on their own computers and removable drives. Outlook allows users to save messages, calendar entries, tasks, and other information in a personal folder on the local machine called PST. From there, these files can be moved to shared drives and removable media. 

My view is that 60% is probably low.  It's probably more like 300%. :)

He then talks about the contradiction in company policies around PST files:

However, only 34% of respondents expressly allow PST files, while 31% don't have a policy. (In case you're wondering, 864 business technology professionals responded to this survey.) 

PST files create major problems for companies including the following:

• They allow users to retain email longer than companies need or want to keep email for.
• When a company has an e-Discovery request or other type of search, because of PSTs, they often have to spend a considerable amount of time and money copying data from employee desktops and laptops and searching through a mountain of information.
• Employees can intentionally (leaving the company) or accidentally (leaving a laptop in the airport) give up the valuable company knowledge in their email to competitors or hackers.
• PST files are typically on PCs that aren't backed up, exposing the employee and the company to lost information and productivity.
• Many employees copy PST files to network hard drives to ensure they are backed up.  As such, GBs or TBs of redundant email (each PST in a company often contains many duplicate messages since many individuals may have received the same email) clog up shared drives.  Some companies estimate 25% - 60% of shared drive storage and backup comes from PST files. 
  
• In addition, every time a PST file is opened (whether modified or not), it "looks" like a changed file to incremental backup programs.  This means PST backup is highly redundant and inefficient.
• Finally, users often spend considerable time managing PST files themselves.

So let's get to the root of the issue?  Why do users create PST files?

At the heart of it, one of the fundamental reasons users love PSTs is that it allows them to get around the company mailbox limits often imposed in Microsoft Exchange to keep the email server efficient, fast and easy to backup.  Mailbox "quotas" attempt to solve the email storage problem but instead shift it to the "underground archives" sitting on employee PCs.

If employees instead had an unlimited email archive integrated into their email, controlled by company policies and fully-searchable, PST files become a great deal less relevant.

So to enforce your PST policies, start at the source by eliminating the need for PSTs altogether. 

gmail is NOT the only "cloud" application

I am sitting here in Los Angeles Airport, waiting for my Friday night redeye flight, eating an ice cream cone and continuing to get disappointed by the depth of our technology media coverage.

Forbes recruited two heavy-hitters (Michael Saylor, CEO of Business Intelligence firm Microstrategy and Nicholas Carr, famous author and recent writer of the book on cloud computing, The Big Switch) to answer questions about cloud computing.  I was excited to read the article, because Forbes is a great publication and Michael Saylor and Nicholas Carr are very accomplished individuals.

Nicholas Carr is a big proponent of cloud computing and has grounded and cautiously-optimistic comments on the space:

What's your imagined time line of the adoption of cloud computing? Will it take years? Decades?

If you're talking about big companies, I would say it will be a slow, steady process lasting maybe 15 to 20 years.

For consumers, cloud computing is here. Applications offered by Google and other software-as-a-service companies are already taking over traditional software. When young people want to do something, they don't go out and buy software. They look to the Web.

For small businesses, it's something in between. Because they don't have as much investment in their current IT infrastructure, they're more willing to consider hosting their entire business on something like Amazon's Web Services.

Unfortunately, Michael Saylor employs the standard "false choice" argument which can be used to attack any new technology:

* [Big company X] will never use it
* And would you trust [low-end service Y]?

In this case, he seems to imply there is nothing between consumer gmail and American Express' financial systems.  Everyone attacking cloud computing loves to hold up Google as the only company running hosted applications.

What about on-demand small business accounting software? How about online customer relationship management technology? You're right - salesforce.com is a fad huh?  And I'm totally biased, but I think email archiving is a great candidate for software-as-a-service.

To me, there are a number of business applications that ARE the same across small to mid-sized businesses and that CAN be outsourced. This isn't mere conjecture - it's happening today.

Saylor goes on to say: 

If I were a small trucking company running a dispatch network and I need five-second response time on the phone, even then I wouldn't run my infrastructure on someone else's architecture. If it goes down, my customers go away. If it's really mission critical, you need to make people really comfortable--and that means 99.999% availability. 

In terms of downtime, I always love the argument that cloud computing is somehow inferior to internally-run applications.  IT departments in small to mid-sized organizations that I know often struggle to have enough capital, manpower and expertise to run systems at the levels of security, availability and performance that their users require.  And how many achieve "99.999% availability"?  Not many that I know.

I agree cloud computing is over-hyped and I agree big companies won't rush to it, but does that mean we should write it off altogether?

Maybe Michael Saylor should go hang out with the CEO of Lawson Software and write about how the Internet will never take off either.

Best practices in archiving: Legal holds

Outside a few regulated industries (e.g., financial services), many customers struggle with defining their email retention policies.  What do they need to keep?  How long does it need to be stored?  When can it be deleted?  How can an email archiving and email discovery system help with this?

Companies rightly wrestle with these challenging questions.  However, there is one area where things are much more clear.  When an organization is going through a lawsuit or reasonably-anticipates an upcoming lawsuit, it is obligated to preserve all information that could be related to that matter, going through a process called a legal hold.  This was further codified for electronic evidence like email in the recent amendments to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

When you look at the headlines around e-Discovery violations, many of the fines and sanctions, including the recent issues Oracle is facing, are related to a failure to observe a legal hold - not a general violation of records retention.  In other words, when a court, judge or matter tells you to preserve electronic records, make sure you can do it.  

This requirement to keep data is there in a surprising number of circumstances:

• Even if you normally would be deleting the data under you standard policies; if you have it, you need to preserve it.
• Even if the data is not online (e.g., on backup tapes), in many cases, you need to preserve it (hence IT often suspends rotation of backup tapes).
• Even if a formal lawsuit hasn't been filed but you reasonably-anticipate an upcoming matter, you may need to start a legal hold.

Previously, companies would enforce legal holds for email in several ways:

• Ask the people who hold the data (custodians) to retain it.  This might involve an email to employees asking them not to delete messages related to a topic.  Obviously this depends on users actually preserving the data and sometimes creates conflicts of interest.
  
• Ask IT to keep backup tapes of the email servers.  Obviously this is very inefficient, since backup tapes are very redundant (almost the same data every day) and coarse (keep everyone's email even though you only need email from a few people).  In addition, backup tapes don't capture messages received/sent and deleted in between the backup period (e.g., between the daily backup).
  
• Ask IT, legal or an outside consultant to capture the hard drive of the employees involved.  This can get very expensive and time-consuming and only captures a one-time snapshot of the user's data.

Increasingly, companies are looking to email archiving solutions and email archiving SaaS solutions in particular to allow IT and legal to enforce legal holds for email quickly and without end-user intervention while still facilitating a platform for the company's long-term retention policies, as they are defined.

In other words, organizations should continue to deliberate their retention policies but many are looking to make sure they are not exposed around legal holds today. 

Best practices in archiving: Blocking and tackling

Today is the first sunday of the NFL season! (I say that with uncontrollable enthusiasm)  And while many fans aspire to see their teams run flea-flickers, reverses and Statue of Liberty plays, most smart coaches know that it's important to start with the basics - blocking and tackling.

Martin Tuip on his Archiving101 blog has a great post about not losing sight of "blocking and tackling" when setting your archiving policies - or KISS, as Martin says.  As someone who's seen thousands of archiving customers over the years, Martin's thinking really resonated with me.

Many customers struggle with a desire to design a perfect system:

• Every message is automatically categorized.
• The system figures out what every message really "means."
• It never makes any mistakes.
• It requires no human intervention.
• It keeps everything only as long as necessary, and no longer.

They sit in committees and vendor pitches, waiting for the nirvana solution to emerge.  Meanwhile:

• Email storage continues to explode.
• Email backup windows grow every day.
• Users continue to create "underground" archives on their PCs.
• Backup tapes accumulate for legal holds and retention.
• IT is stuck restoring tapes and imaging PCs to respond to legal requests.
• Legal is unsure whether legal holds are really being enforced. 

In other words, companies wait to design the perfect play, but get stuck not moving the ball at all and having to punt it away.  

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and the "mid-tail"

I'm a firm believer that over time, software-as-a-service (SaaS) will appeal to companies of all sizes.

However, we are seeing, as are many of our SaaS brethren, that a good chunk of the early adopters for SaaS fall into the "mid-tail" of businesses. Mid-sized companies, with anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand employees, seem to be in the perfect sweet spot for SaaS in general.

The Enterprise Strategy Group commissioned a survey on the subject:

The Milford, MA-based analyst firm polled 544 IT decision makers at midsize organizations with 100 to 999 employees, and in a companion survey, polled 234 North American IT channel partners. More than one-third of the respondents said they're making some production use of SaaS offerings. Another 28% of participants said they aren't currently using hosted services but are likely to implement them in the next 24 months.

Congratulations to Google on Chrome!

Kudos to Google for their innovation with Google Chrome, their new web browser that was just introduced in BETA.

Beyond having one of the most creative marketing campaigns I've seen in a while, Google introduced a great offering that should help individuals, businesses and companies trying to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS). As the browser gets better, SaaS gets better too. And I'm personally excited to get rid of these annoying Firefox browser crashes when I have 25 tabs open. :)

More than compliance: Email archiving and employee turnover

Most companies typically think of email archiving solutions as helping to mitigate cost and risk - namely:

• Reduce compliance risk by automatically retaining emails for regulations, records management policies and/or legal holds
• Reduce e-Discovery cost by allowing legal staff to search, refine and review emails and attachments, eliminating the need for expensive backup and laptop restores, data processing services and attorney review time
• Reduce storage and backup time and cost by giving the user a scalable, Unlimited Mailbox without clogging up the primary email system

This post is the beginning of a series of blog entries on how email archiving "in the cloud" can allow companies to drive business value, not just reduce cost and risk.

As a CEO, I always think about cost and risk but frankly even higher up on my agenda are things like:

• Improving client satisfaction
• Driving sales growth
• Enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity

On that third point, most CEOs specifically struggle with questions like the following:

1. How do I retain my talented employees?
2. When employees leave (and some will), how do I retain their knowledge for the company?
3. How do I transition this knowledge to their replacements so I can on-board them quickly?

As we all know now, email has become our filing cabinet or, in more modern terms, our "data warehouse" for all of our unstructured information. As such, it is a curse (if not managed) or a blessing (if properly controlled) with respect to employee turnover.

The curse is the way things normally work:

• Employee leaves
• Employee takes PST/NSF (personal archive) files with all old email from company
• Employer loses intellectual property and knowledge
• If employee goes to competitor, things could be even worse
• New employee taking over job has to start from scratch
• What were our latest interactions with clients?
• What promises did we make internally?
• What did last year's proposal look like so I don't have to start over?
• Sales cycles slow, customer satisfaction is damaged and employees themselves struggle

With an email archive, companies can:

• Prevent employees from taking their email with them (by disabling the need for PST creation and giving employees an Unlimited Mailbox in corporate control, rather than islands of "underground archives" in the form of PST/NSF files)
• Preserve knowledge and IP in company control during inevitable employee turnover
• Transition the information to the new employee by giving him/her access to the archive (or a subset) from the employee whom she or he is replacing

Lawson CEO has head in the clouds

As anyone within a 100 mile radius of me knows, I'm a crazy NFL football fan.  As you know, the NFL, like all businesses, evolves.  Youngsters might look to recent progress like the popularity of the 3-4 defense or the Patriots' approach to player selection.  Folks of the previous generation recall the advent of Bill Walsh's West Coast offense.  True students of the game probably remember the changes that ensued with quarterback and receiver-friendly rule adjustments during the 1970s and 1980s.

But is there someone out there, perhaps beyond octogenerian status, who decries the pass-happy NFL of today and longs for the golden age of the 1920s, before the advent of the forward pass? If so, that person should meet Harry Debes, CEO of on-premise ERP software vendor Lawson Software. I think the two would get along fabulously.

That's a bit tongue in cheek. In his interview attacking software-as-a-service (SaaS) on ZDNet, Debes makes some valid points including:

1. SaaS companies are less profitable than traditional licensed software companies: "Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability." He's totally right. The beautiful "old world" of licensed software allowed you to build software once and sell it over and over again with minimal marginal cost, giving companies like Microsoft crazy-high net profit margins. Customers were left with tons of shelfware, delayed projects and exploding budgets, but the vendors still collected their checks. In the SaaS world (like email archiving or hosted Exchange), we take the burden of running technology off customers' hands, so SaaS vendors get less short-term revenue and profit. This is pure economics. Markets evolve to drive down "above-normal" profit margins over time and shift more value to customers.
2. SaaS is hyped: "People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years." Like any new industry, SaaS will go through its hype cycle. No doubt. But just because something is hyped (e.g., the Internet, mobile phones or Lost), doesn't mean it's not valuable.
3. On-premise solutions lock you in: "The cost of moving is too high. As long as it's working, people are happy to stick with one product." And yes, I think all of us in the SaaS world would agree that customers get locked-in to on-premise software (not sure if he's supporting his point here though :) )

And overall, I'm sure Debes is a very smart and capable guy. You couldn't get to be CEO of such a great and successful company without having a number of strong attributes. As a CEO of a much-smaller company, I'm sure there is a ton that I could learn from Debes.

However, the tone of his interview is that SaaS will never go anywhere and that's where a small army and I would probably beg to differ. In many ways, this is a perfect example of the concept popularized by the Clayton Christensen book The Innovator's Dilemma:

• Small but rapidly-growing market (SaaS)
• Less attractive to entrenched players (on-premise software vendors) than existing markets
• Written off as nothing (too small, not profitable)
• Becomes big over time (3-5 years from now)
• New generation of companies emerge (salesforce.com and ???)

It happened in hard disk drives (as the book discussed). It took place with the introduction of Personal Computers (my dad was a long-time executive at Digital Equipment Corporation, a company that missed this boat). We lived through it in the transition to digital music. And we're seeing it now with the emergence of SaaS.

The obvious disclaimer is that I am a self-admitted SaaS "fanboy" and have written many times on the virtues of SaaS.

As with most arguments in life, however, this is not a black-and-white discussion. To frame it as such makes this a false choice. It's not EITHER SaaS is dead OR on-premise is extinct. I think we're just witnessing the beginning of a mass transformation that will take many years to complete. Don't forget - physical travel agencies, in-person brokerage firms and Blockbuster Video still exist - they're just less relevant now after Orbitz, E*TRADE and Netflix.

For some time, many big companies will be too entrenched with internal biases or complex processes to adopt SaaS, so its initial value will come from serving the mid to long "tail" of customers who are more willing to embrace on-demand. So Debes is right that large enterprises aren't all running to SaaS any time soon. Luckily there are enough small-to-mid-sized organizations that have been unsatisfied by on-premise technology over the years that the market is very robust (robust enough to make us profitable for several years running, in fact).

Fundamentally, SaaS makes things possible that never were there before, including:

• Near-immediate time-to-value
• Pay-as-you-go with transparent cost of ownership
  
• Integrate in the cloud

So it's not just about attacking the on-premise market. Instead this is about something bigger - creating a new, broader and better market than the one that existed before. To me, that's the exciting part of my job - that we can create value for companies that never existed previously.

Apparently Debes has different aspirations for his company's value:

"Getting signed up as a SaaS customer is fast, but getting out is just as fast. Whereas traditional software is like cocaine--you're hooked. It's too difficult and expensive to switch providers once you've invested in one. If it were easier to jump ship, a lot of people would've hit the eject button on SAP a long time ago."

I don't know about you, but my mom didn't raise me to be no drug dealer. :) And I love it when my Pittsburgh Steelers throw downfield. I guess I'm just caught up in the hype.