Cloud-powered archiving does not penalize a simple straightforward “keep it all” plan. This means IT decision makers can implement retention archiving now, and create policies later. It’s a Win-Win scenario for IT and businesses, and is the cure to “policy paralysis.”

Records management professionals are confused about “cloud storage” and where the data physically resides. The “cloud” may imply data is scattered around the globe and un-organized. But that is a misnomer and not true. Inside each cloud, Amazon Web Services for example, is a physical data center just like any other. With very tight security and very good up-time SLA’s.

Pelz-Sharpe says about cloud and records retention: “You need to know exactly how data is disposed of, and how that can be verified.” We couldn’t agree more. In a compliance mode data retention and data destruction are equally as important. Encryption and virtual shredding in the cloud are possible and can be a better way to shred data than using on-premise SAN/WormFS systems where too many touch-points expose risk. Records management in this era of all digital information is vital, and the cloud provides the confidence and low cost to ensure companies will not skimp on their records management initiatives.

As we wait for the investigation to report the facts, what we do know is that the tax payer will bear the expense burden for forensic experts, and the City of Boston’s existing $1 million dollar outlay for archiving and e-discovery last year did not adequately preserve all the data.

On-premise expensive software and hardware based archives are less secure and more susceptible to tampering than cloud-based archives. The right cloud-based solution can be more secure than on-premise, reducing data touch points, one set of secure access credentials, and always allowing fast immediate access to all the stored data.

These findings match our experience with hosted email archiving; A majority (by greater than 10%) of new customers archive for compliance with storage management as the secondary consideration in their archive purchasing drivers.

Our product designers at Sonian Labs are working on some exciting new visualization techniques to help our hosted email archive audience search their unstructured data more efficiently.

The traditional e-discovery experience is to view a linear listing of documents that must be viewed one-by-one to determine relevance to the search request. Sonian is working on newer ways to evaluate the contents of the data set earlier in the process that allow reviewers to focus on the documents that are most important to the case and to eliminate those that have no relevance. Visualization techniques, lightning fast search, and a “time-machine” view of the data set will be a powerful combination of tools at your finger tips (and in your web browser.)

This not only helps with formulating a successful case strategy, but it can save a tremendous amount of time and money with e-discovery processing and review.

Email and collaboration, by the nature of how they need to be available 24×7 and place demanding burden on already over-worked IT staff, are perfect problem for cloud based solutions. A hybrid approach is to keep the core server on premise and host the ancillary services likes anti-spam/virus and archiving. Companies gain the benefit of cloud computing, and as the experience of using cloud services gets better, more IT functions can be moved into the cloud over time. But start with archiving today.

For many organizations a hosted email archive option is not only a viable choice, it’s the best choice. Businesses get the benefits of not having to maintain their own infrastructure, and since SaaS vendors can update all customers at once, new features and capabilities are updated on a regular basis, without the need to go through costly software upgrades.

Backup is all about quickly recovering a file or a damaged server.

Archive is about search, finding the “needle in the hay stack” quickly.

Two very different needs and therefore different solutions are needed. Implement a cloud compute based hosted email archive solution to get the best ROI for your IT budget.

From the CMS Watch article:

For the record: a back-up is designed to manage short-term risk and provide a facility for disaster recovery. An archive, on the other hand, is designed to help manage long-term risk, ensuring that historical data can be accessed and remains authentic either for the business user or even an auditor or lawyer.

How did the cost reach $15 million? Let’s look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer’s time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for “security” checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that’s $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.

A proactive, self-service hosted email archive service could deliver the same results for a quadruple fraction of the estimated costs cited above.

Electronic records management systems, email archiving and e-discovery systems will need to step up to the plate and deliver results without undue burden on IT budgets or department man-power time.

Sonian is here to do our part. Scalable, reliable, secure, and most importantly, affordable email archiving for all.

Not only is reliable cost efficient storage a necessity, but more importantly is the need for effective search to find exactly what you are looking for in ever growing digital archives.

It’s a given today’s storage choices offer low-cost options, but these systems typically only address half the problem. Now that we have nearly infinite storage resources, how do we find the “needle in the haystack”? Better search technologies, coupled with low cost reliable storage is the key. Sonian is working on advanced techniques to make searching billions of stored objects more efficient for the user that needs quick answers and “actionable intelligence” from the information archive.