Sonian Hosted Archiving Services » Archiving

Sonian GroupWise Archving Saves NKF Storage Costs

Greg Arnette — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:41:05 +0000

National Kidney Foundation cuts GroupWise storage with cloud storage email archiving. Search Storage reports that NKF is saving money on email storage with the Sonian Archive hosted service.

Hosted archiving does not require any on-premises hardware or software, and enables the IT department to focus on other projects without worrying about email retention and long term storage.

Archive it All and Create Policies Later

Greg Arnette — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:01:17 +0000

Many times archiving projects get put off for another day because of “policy paralysis,” which is an affliction that prohibits IT decision makers from deciding what to keep and what to discard before implementing archiving.

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.”

Shards of Content Need Centralized Information Governance

Greg Arnette — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Overflowing in-boxes, maxed out email servers, and now even more places for employees to generate content. Enterprises are implementing new collaboration systems (Sharepoint, GDocs, ZoHo) for document sharing, which means employees will have more options beyond email to collaborate internally with each other and externally with customers, vendors, friends & family.

These new capabilities mean there are growing “shards of content” data silos in the enterprise that need to be captured and archived for compliance, e-discovery, storage management and universal information governance best practices.

Sonian believes the best most cost-effective and reliable way to solve this problem is a centralized archiving service, powered by cloud-scale infrastructure as a service. Here’s why:

Installed archiving software never has enough compute power for large searches or deep analytics. The cloud offers CPU on demand to power through terabytes of content.
Installed archiving software consumes a lot of your expensive SAN and backup/DR storage. The cloud as your long-term storage locker with integrated search and analytics is configured as a virtual extension of your own network. A double Win-Win combination: less cost and just as secure.
Installed archiving software can’t help you gain valuable data insights to manage “top-line-growth” issues from better business intelligence and value that can be extracted from all content silos across the organization.

Email Server Feature: Email Archiving Market to Hit $5.1 Billion in 2013

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:00:42 +0000

“Implementing an archival system helps businesses better manage a large amount of email and file attachments”

By Amy Tierney, TMCnet Web Editor

As more and more businesses use email as one of their primary forms of communication, companies are quickly realizing the importance of archiving those messages. And software companies like Lexington, Mass.-based Ipswitch Inc. are benefiting.

According to a recent study by The Radicati Group, Inc., the total email archiving market, which includes both on-premises and hosted email archiving solutions, is expected to grow from nearly $2.1 billion in 2009, to more than $5.1 billion in 2013. What’s more, about 75 percent of all archiving solutions are being sold as on-premises products, whereas 25 percent of archiving solutions are sold as hosted services, the survey found.

The “Email Archiving Market, 2009-2013″ study offers market size, installed base and revenue market share by vendor, four-year forecasts, email traffic and storage statistics for the email archiving market. The study also highlights legislative and technology issues, and includes a survey of corporate deployment and procurement plans.

Companies are using email archiving solutions to monitor employee communications and store messages. In addition, email archiving helps firms comply with state and federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act.

Implementing an archival system helps businesses better manage a large amount of email and file attachments, Ipswitch (News – Alert) officials said. Email archiving not only aids in data storage and retrieval, but it also saves space on email servers. Those are just a few reasons why Ipswitch is seeing an uptick in its hosted and installed email archiving solutions.

For example, the company’s hosted solution, Sonian Hosted Email Archiving, is designed to accommodate compliance archiving, as well as storage resource management. The solution uses the Amazon cloud to archive incoming, outgoing and internal email. Administrators or third-parties can search and retrieve email from an intuitive control panel. The affordable and scalable service is available for organizations of all sizes, Ipswitch said.

A free online demo is available here.

For companies looking for an installed solution, Ipswitch’s MailArchiva Enterprise Edition works with popular mail systems and archives all incoming, outgoing and internal email. The solution lives on a file system, as opposed to a database, which organizations can easily access. It also helps companies comply with regulatory issues, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Ipswitch said.

Amy Tierney is a Web editor for TMCnet, covering unified communications, telepresence, IP communications industry trends and mobile technologies. To read more of Amy’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Amy Tierney

Cloud-powered Email Archiving is Perfect Neutral Repository

Greg Arnette — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:52:52 +0000

The City of Boston’s Mayor’s office is embroiled in controversy for not preserving email records for a key adviser to the Mayor. The specific details are still being uncovered, and storage forensic experts have been retained to try to recover deleted messages from workstations and servers. If the backup tapes exist some of the data will be recovered, but at huge expense.

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.

Sonian Closes $5.6M Series A Financing

Greg Arnette — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:30:41 +0000

Team Sonian is very excited to officially announce our Series A financing round. We’re working with two great investors, Prism VentureWorks and SummerHill Venture Partners, to create the world’s first true cloud-compute powered data archiving and information intelligence platform.

Sonian sees a sizeable opportunity uniting cloud computing with managing employee generated content, and creating value added services for this rich data. Prism and Summerhill share our vision for “Hybrid IT”, one where businesses strategically and tactically meld cloud-powered SaaS functions with on-premise servers in order to access their data seamlessly, instantly and cost-effectively.

The financing will be used to expand the company’s marketing and engineering efforts.

Entrepreneurs look to clouds

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:03:22 +0000

Cloud Power

Service likely to change how IT industry does business

By Scott Kirsner Globe Columnist / March 15, 2009

In these stormy times, just about the only sunny spot in the world of information technology is the coming of cloud computing. Start-ups are being formed, venture capitalists are doling out cash, and big companies such as EMC Corp. and Iron Mountain are formulating strategies and announcing cloud computing offerings.

What’s cloud computing? It’s a broad and somewhat nebulous term that refers to services and software that run on computers that you don’t need to purchase or operate yourself – they’re “out there,” in the clouds. Essentially, it’s a new twist on outsourcing. Cloud computing users pay only for the services they need – much the same way you pay your water bill – which offers the ability to increase or decrease capacity as needed.

If you use Google’s Gmail service for e-mail, that’s a type of cloud computing. But much of the cloud action happening locally is around enabling businesses to outsource tasks such as archiving e-mails or running analyses of their latest sales numbers, without having to buy the hardware or software themselves.

“Cloud computing will change how we do IT, end-to-end, over the next five years,” says Chuck Hollis, vice president of global marketing at EMC, the Hopkinton-based storage firm. “It’s like in the early 20th century, if you were a manufacturer, you had to build your own power plant. But eventually, you had the option to buy your electricity from the grid, and let someone else worry about how it was generated. Corporate data centers are going to have that kind of choice, too.”

EMC has formed a new business unit called the Cloud Infrastructure Group, run by an executive in Seattle who also oversees Mozy, the company’s data back-up service for consumers and small businesses. But the company isn’t yet selling cloud services to its meat-and-potatoes corporate customers. Hollis says the company is still in discussions with these larger customers about their needs, and how they’d like to take advantage of cloud-based services.

Last month, Iron Mountain, a publicly traded company based in Boston, unveiled its own cloud service called Virtual File Store. Customers can use it to archive data to which they don’t need frequent access, paying a monthly fee rather than buying their own storage devices (which often come from a company such as EMC).

Local venture capital firms are studying the cloud computing opportunity, and they’ve funded at least two companies so far.

The first was CloudSwitch Inc., a Bedford start-up that was incubated in the offices of Matrix Partners for much of last year. CloudSwitch raised $7.4 million from Matrix and Atlas Venture, another local venture capital firm, in January.

“Cloud computing seems to be fueled by the recession, when you have companies looking carefully at their budgets,” says chief executive Ellen Rubin. Instead of buying hardware and software that must be listed as large, one-time capital expenses, Rubin says, paying a monthly fee for cloud services is a smaller, ongoing operating expense.

CloudSwitch is focusing on helping large companies take advantage of cloud services. “We’re focused on the connection between the enterprise data center and all these new cloud providers,” she says. “By moving things into the cloud, we want to help chief information officers free up space in their data centers, and free up resources, and let companies use that for higher-value purposes.” That’s the classic argument that has always been made about the benefits of outsourcing.

Another cloud-oriented company with local ties is Good Data, which offers customers the ability to analyze information about their business and create constantly updated reports online.

The company is in the final stages of wrapping up an initial funding round of several million dollars, led by Cambridge-based General Catalyst Partners. Good Data’s engineering team is based in Prague and while there was some talk about plunking the US headquarters in Boston, the company just rented space in San Francisco.

“The way I look at it, we’re seeing the destruction of the data center,” says Larry Bohn, the partner at General Catalyst who is backing Good Data. (That, of course, could mean the loss of some high-paying information technology jobs in data centers.) He adds that he has been seeing lots of companies trying to build businesses that tie into the cloud computing trend – though not all of them have found niches that are defensible enough. Good Data founder Roman Stanek has sold two previous start-ups, to Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

“What you do is try to bet early, bet on the right people, and try to get a headstart,” says Bohn.

Sonian Networks Inc. is a 10-person start-up in Dedham that is selling unlimited e-mail archiving for $36 per month, per user. The company soon hopes to archive other information, like instant messages, online chats, and collaboration sessions. The company’s services run atop cloud infrastructure run by Amazon.com, which has emerged, oddly enough, as one of the leading vendors in the cloud computing market. Sonian has raised $1.2 million of convertible debt so far, and chief executive George Nichols says he expects the company to reach breakeven by this spring or summer.

Another local cloud start-up that hoped to sell storage services, Juneau Technology, never quite took shape despite making the rounds of venture capital firms. Despite having worked for start-ups and larger entities like EMC and Digital Equipment, founder A.J. Beaverson says, “I’m not a branded serial entrepreneur, and in a tough economy, that raises the bar significantly” on attracting investment.

It seems small and midsize businesses will be the first to integrate cloud-based services, while bigger companies will take longer to figure out how these services relate to their existing operations, whether they’re secure and reliable enough, and whether they comply with all sorts of regulatory requirements. But the appeal is that cloud-based services can cut the costs of all sorts of IT operations like storage and number-crunching and payment processing, while giving companies the flexibility to simply pay a higher monthly fee as they grow – or pay less when they shrink.

“I think investors’ interest in cloud computing is high because of exactly the economic situation we’re in,” says Rubin. “Where else is there an area where there’s a disruptive trend going on that actually benefits from the recession?”

Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com.