Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Cloud Archive With Exchange 2010
By: Nick Mehta | Posted: 2009-11-09If you're a messaging geek like me, you know Microsoft announced Exchange 2010 General Availability today. Major releases from Microsoft don't come too frequently, but when they do, they have a big impact.
Read Microsoft executive Rajesh Jha's very personal and eloquent blog post on the Exchange 2010 release to see some great customer quotes about how Exchange 2010 has helped businesses already, such as this one from Bank of America SVP Allan Tagg:
"We're always moving users around. We've been doing that with custom scripts in Exchange Server 2003, but we will definitely be using the Online Move Mailbox feature in 2010. Now we can move them without taking the mailbox offline."
Overall, Exchange 2010 is huge for the industry. Congrats to Microsoft on continuing to push the bar on innovation.
You may remember that with our pure software-as-a-service approach to email archiving, we were able to announce Exchange 2010 support on September 1, 2009.
And while Exchange 2010 claims some limited archiving functionality, I encourage customers to look below the surface to understand what they are getting.
Indeed, you can read this excellent review of Exchange 2010 by Joel Snyder at Network World, including this critique of the archiving functionality:
Personal archiving
Joel says: Thumbs down...for now.
With Enterprise licensing, you can enable a personal archive for any user, which creates a twin mailbox in the same message store. Users can drag-and-drop mail there, or Exchange rules can move it there automatically based on policy. Intended as a replacement for those PST files that users seem to keep creating, and losing, the archive doesn't make much sense as long as it has to be stored in the same mailbox database as the original mailbox -- which it does in this release of Exchange. When that limitation is lifted and you can give users tons of slow, cheap storage for e-mail archiving, this'll be a thumbs-up.
So without further ado, here's our highly-self-serving but nonetheless true list of reasons you need a cloud archive with Exchange 2010:
10: No Single Instance Storage (SIS): To achieve the storage optimization for Exchange 2010, Microsoft was forced to disable the already-limited SIS capabilities in previous versions of Exchange. This means you'll be using up even more disk for that 100th version of the same 20 MB corporate PowerPoint presentation!
9: Requires Enterprise license: While Exchange 2010 may advertise "built-in" archiving, the functionality requires that you have the Enterprise version of the license, creating extra expense for most customers.
8: Requires Outlook 2010: In the same theme, the supposedly "free" functionality requires that customers upgrade to Outlook 2010. Obviously desktop app upgrades are a big (and costly) deal for most companies.
7: E-Discovery workflow is awkward: Customers that use Exchange 2010 for E-Discovery will be surprised to know that search results from a discovery have to be exported to an Exchange mailbox, versus the normal route of exporting them to the file system. This means that if you have a big discovery request with 100s of GBs of data, you'd better clear up some server space! In addition, because Exchange 2010 doesn't provide a cloud-based archive, your outside counsel or other external partners can't easily collaborate on E-Discovery.
6: No SEC/FINRA email compliance: If you are a customer that has requirements around storing email on immutable storage (known as WORM storage) or supervising email for policy violations, you will still need a third-party archiving system.
5: Your email can't go down: Exchange 2010 has significantly enhanced the redundancy of the Exchange platform. However, whether its because of power issues, network issues or data center issues, your email service is still vulnerable and for most Exchange administrators, that's scary. Some cloud-based archiving solutions provide the added benefit of built-in email continuity, ensuring you can send and receive messages even if your internal email server is unavailable.
4: No backup/restore optimization: One of the biggest drivers for email archiving in the early days wasn't around compliance, discovery or anything so business-oriented. Customer email databases were getting too big and backups were taking too long. This meant backups were overrunning stated windows and restores were becoming impractical. Unfortunately Exchange 2010 archiving keeps archived data in the same email database as primary data, despite the fact that it's not changing anymore. This means your backups continue to grow and grow. In contrast, with a cloud-based archiving solution, you can keep your primary databases (and related backups) small and offload older data to the cloud.
3: Still in storage business: In that same vein, fundamentally, with Exchange 2010, you are still in the business of buying and managing storage to meet your users' ever-growing demands. That means more vendor meetings, more procurement, more money and more scaling issues. And since all of the data needs to live in the same storage device for primary and archived mailboxes, this means more expensive storage, even for data that's never used. In contrast, with a cloud-based archive, you never have to buy storage again, unless you really want to!
2: Unpredictable costs: Netting it all out, with the backup complexities and growing storage environment, Exchange 2010 archiving means you are still in the same world of having to guess where you email usage will be in a few years and size accordingly. Guess low and you end up having scaling issues. Guess high and you wasted money. In contrast, a cloud-based archive gives you predictable, flat costs with unlimited storage, so you don't have to worry.
1: Lock you out of the cloud: Finally, customers will choose third-party cloud-based archives because they are also looking at moving email to the cloud - with Microsoft or possibly with Google, Cisco, Intermedia or a host of other vendors. Needless to say, Exchange 2010 archiving would lock them out of that flexibility.
