Current Filter: Storage>>>>>>

   

However, does having your archive in the cloud simply pass the baton on rather than solving the issue? Whether we like it or not email volumes will continue to grow, they are the key business communication tool. Passing this storage to the cloud can make it easier to predict and control costs as management of the system is outsourced." Bingeman continues "When a customer has moved their data to 'The Cloud' the biggest consideration is, can he regain control of that information as required? Some cloud providers have restrictions on exporting data or have high charges to bring the data out of their system. This can be especially prohibitive if the customer has a large volume of data in the Cloud."

According to EASY Software's Howard Frear, the problem is broader than simply cost: "Email in the Cloud is now quite well established with all the mainstream vendors providing the capability of operating this most mission critical of applications via highly available data centres. So the related question - that of the increasingly important choice of email archiving technologies either for compliance, e-discovery or better data management - is usually one of an additional charge per mailbox as part of the Cloud service.

For service providers offering these platforms, there is a significant advantage in deploying multi-tenanted email archiving solutions such as our latest release of EASY for Exchange; this has features such as data compression and a further level of single incidence storage, both of which sharply reduce administration costs associated with email hosting, whilst offering a valuable service to clients in enhanced search capabilities.

"However, the challenge remains to those organisations who wish to manage their own on-premise email platforms but also want to avail themselves of Cloud archiving for the same business reasons mentioned above. The principal challenge is one of available bandwidth. Email is bandwidth hungry, especially with users continuing to want to send large quantities of attachments (some of which are more suited for content sharing applications such as Dropbox or other secure FTP methods where heavy content can be referenced as links). Naturally the email archiving tasks have to be carried out at some convenient time which, unless this can be out of normal business hours, just adds to the bandwidth traffic."

Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C, also cautions against an 'idealised view' of archiving email to the Cloud: "The idea that your email archive could be stored in a data centre hosted from within the Cloud as opposed to internally from within your company's infrastructure is attractive to administrators who need to cut costs and overheads. Such a model brings companies a central repository that appears 'always on' and available anywhere in the world; and one that can scale with the size of the organisation and growing email volumes. This idealised view ignores the obvious glitches that the Internet still throws in connectivity outages or issues from the service providers."

"We advise our customers that there are basically three options to consider in full, each of which has its own distinct benefits and weaknesses," continues Hunt. "Firstly, SMEs may consider archiving everything to the Cloud to shift costs from Capex to Opex overheads whilst providing a simplified operation with a flexible growth licence path. In this option, companies need to weigh the value of an "all-cloud" approach with the loss of being able to completely and seamlessly manage your own email archive, together with frequent contract tie-ins that actively prevents switching between suppliers.

Page   1  2