Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

SaaS Security, the Age-Long Debate

Michael Osterman of Osterman Research submitted an entry to Messaging Wire a couple of days ago about the misconception that the SaaS delivery model is less secure than your average on-premise solution.

He made some excellent points and did so in short order. The following two resonated with me:

• Education is the key. Take the time to help decision makers understand how secure (or insecure) their on-premise infrastructure and data transmission actually is.
  
• Help prospective customers to understand that their internal security procedures may be giving them a false sense of security. Is it particularly difficult for an employee to gain access to a server room and run off with a backup tape or external storage device? In many cases, it's not.

Osterman goes on to suggest that leading SaaS providers are able to offer better security because they have access to far more resources than most organizations do with their on-premise implementations. We couldn't agree more.

This entry is just a precursor to a study that Osterman Research will be publishing shortly. We're certainly interested in seeing and addressing the statistics associated with the security aspect of SaaS.

 

Careful, Hitting “Delete” Doesn’t Always Mean It’s Gone for Good

I am constantly amazed that people, including public officials, still think they can completely delete things they send via email. Although you may delete email from your possession, you have no control over the recipients of those messages - or the recipients they may forward your messages to, and so on. Your company - or government entity, as the case may be - could very well have an email archiving solution in place that is automatic and seamless, and you may or may not know about it. The recipients' organizations are likely archiving as well. One thing is for sure: There is always a trail.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is finding out the hard way that deleting email is not a best practice. Two local city councilors and challengers of Menino in an upcoming Democratic preliminary election are asking the local attorney general and district attorney to investigate the routine deletion of emails by officials in Menino's administration, including those sent and received by one of his closest advisors, Michael J. Kineavy.

The controversy arose when the Boston Globe requested copies of Kineavy's email communications over a six-month period. The search returned only 18 results. The unusually low volume of email led to questioning by city officials and an admission by Kineavy that he doesn't allow his email to be backed up and deletes all of it on a daily basis, which violates state public records law.

The result of this investigation is yet to be determined, but whether or not an archiving solution was in place, chances are that some of those emails will turn up somewhere. An email archiving solution is a really great insurance policy for any organization, public or private, that may become the subject of an investigation or lawsuit - and it saves a lot of time and money in instances like the one brewing in Boston.

This isn't the first time we've seen a case like this, and unfortunately, it's probably not going to be the last. The bottom line? If you're trying to hide something, it will inevitably catch up with you, thanks to technology and the age of electronic communications.

LiveOffice and EOS: A Partnership in the Clouds

It's pitch black outside and the crickets are chirping, but today we decided to wake up early and announce that we've formed a partnership with the UK-based value-added reseller, EMEA Office Systems.

Martin Blackmore and Mark Thomson at EOS both have decades of experience in the storage industry and really know archiving. A few of us at LiveOffice have worked with them in the past and we're glad to be working with them again. When they proposed the idea of a partnership, we were all ears. Their regional knowledge combined with our archiving services provides EMEA-based businesses with the winning option for cloud-based email archiving and e-discovery services.

You can check out the news release here: http://bit.ly/A0Tg8

Ready to Make Your Server the Biggest Loser?

Today we announced archiving support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and we're pretty excited about it. We've tested the journaling functionality extensively in our labs and it works great. What we're even more excited about is the tools we've built over the last few months to help ease the migration pains that many organizations will inevitably struggle with as they upgrade to Exchange 2010.

We believe companies should have a simple process for shrinking their Exchange data stores prior to moving them so that they can speed up the transition process. So while Valerie Bertinelli has Jenny Craig and Jared has Subway, we're hoping Exchange shops will consider our pre-migration diet, which consists of:

• LiveOffice Personal Archive: First, clients enable journaling on their existing mail servers, allowing LiveOffice to capture data in its secure cloud, which effectively eliminates the need to migrate that data in the future. With Personal Archive's robust architecture, end users are able to view all archived email (legacy and current) from the comfort of their Microsoft Outlook client.
• LiveOffice CloudMerge for Microsoft Exchange: Next, clients can leverage LiveOffice's proprietary CloudMerge technology to automatically and securely transfer data from existing Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 mail stores to LiveOffice Personal Archive. Again, this data is available for view by end users directly from Microsoft Outlook.
• LiveOffice CloudMerge for PST Files: LiveOffice's CloudMerge technology is also able to securely ingest an organization's PST files into the centrally managed, hosted archive - eliminating the most common source of data loss and IT headaches.
• "Skinny Migration:" With all historical and ongoing email securely stored in LiveOffice's cloud-based archive, IT administrators only need to migrate a small amount of data to their upgraded Exchange 2010 environment.

The official launch of Exchange 2010 isn't expected until later this year, but we are encouraging companies to start archiving their messages now so that they can focus on the actual upgrade when the time comes.

You can read our news release here.