Sonian Hosted Archiving

Latest Articles in this Channel:

09/12/08--11:20: TTCO - True TCO Analysis for SaaS comparison (chan 1460595)

SaaS hosted email archiving delivered from a cloud compute platform is the right combination for lowest cost and highest performing service. But when comparing SaaS versus software or appliance based solutions it's not as easy to compare true total cost of ownership. Installed solutions have indirect costs beyond the software license fees and hardware invoice. You can debate the budget aportions to alot to onpremise email archiving, but you can't deny that there is some tangible indirect cost that needs to be factored to get a true apples to apples comparison.

True ROI and TCO is comprised of factroring some or all of the items below, plus the software fees, maintenance fees, and hardware costs:

1. People cost
2. Bandwidth cost
3. Maintainence cost
4. Hardware cost
5. Electric cost
6. Downtime cost
7. Redundancy cost
8. Software license cost
9. Cost of floor space used
10. Response time






09/29/08--05:52: Educational web seminar for Novell GroupWise on Cloud Computing (chan 1460595)

Sonian sponsored a web seminar to help the Novell GroupWise community accelerate their knowledge about Cloud Computing. During this event Messaging, Collaboration and Cloud Computing expert, Greg Arnette (CTO of Sonian) reviewed the potentials for GroupWise and Cloud Computing. The seminar also discussed how Cloud Computing is transforming how email archiving and data management is addressed today and into the future. Rated by many participants from the GroupWise community as "one of the most informative webinars in the past 2 years."

Access the on-demand webinar here.







09/30/08--05:15: Running out of room: How to keep more data efficiently accessible (chan 1460595)

The WSJ posted a column Running Out of Room which describes the problem companies face trying to store more data: they're getting squeezed by both space and cost constraints.

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.











10/01/08--12:57: Can you trust "free" services for critical infrastructure? (chan 1460595)


Free services are good, right? Well maybe....

The consumer space is full of free web services that manage your email, photos and blogs. And the free services are supported by advertising revenue on the back end data assets.

But is the enterprise going to embrace a free service to help with critical archiving or disaster recovery needs? Customers thinking about using a free service for infrastructure need to be wary of the vendors commitment to the service.

Free may seem appealing, but think about the long-term viability of a company that hopes to monetize at some point in the future. They may not make it.






10/02/08--12:22: Email is still consuming the most storage (chan 1460595)

Peter Schilling, Director of IT at Amherst College, posted a great summary of interesting facts about the colleges' IT infrastructure.

A key finding is the volume of email data is increasing, and that 95% of the storage footprint is consumed by attachments. A great archiving solution can help with attachment management.

Thanks to Peter for sharing this interesting information.


• Average number of emails received per day: 180,000.
• Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94%.
• Percentage of storage space taken up by email, a system designed to send brief text messages, that is actually taken up the files attached to the emails: 95%.
• Ratio of the storage required for email and attachments for just the year 2007 to that of all of the preceding 5 years together: 1 to 1.
  






10/13/08--10:24: IT role with compliance is about to get interesting (chan 1460595)

The world-wide financial systems' near-collapse will certainly spur new legislation requiring more oversight and reporting about transactions and relationships between the different financial sectors. There will also likely be an uptick in lawsuits and investigations, and a need to know "who said what when" to figure out the truth trail. This is when an email archiving solution can provide actionable intelligence.

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.






10/20/08--11:12: There otta be a law.... $15 million for Email Discovery in Alaska (chan 1460595)

MSNBC is reporting the estimated cost to recover email records for various investigations could cost Alaska tax payers upwards of fifteen million dollars. Here's the math (from the MSNBC report:)


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.






10/21/08--05:49: Revealing. Is this common? Pinching email space to save pennies. (chan 1460595)

An anonymous contributor to the Infoworld Off The Record column tells a woeful tale about his experience in the IT department for an insurance company. Seems the IT Director was being a little too cost conscious and removing Exchange log files to save disk space, rather than upgrade the server storage, or implement an archiving service.

Healthy log files are critical to Exchange stability, so deleting them is putting the whole server at risk. And not to mention the reduced productivity for the user that is forced to scrutinize every message in their mailbox to decide what to keep and what to discard.

Seems a little too "penny-wise pound foolish" and I hope for the sake of the insurance company a more rational approach is applied to email server management.






10/22/08--05:19: What's the difference between backup and archive? Search! (chan 1460595)


Don't confuse your backup system for an email archive. Relying on backup as a way to quickly search email records can be a costly mistake.

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.






10/24/08--06:12: More goodness in the cloud - EC2 SLA, Windows support (chan 1460595)

Amazon continues to demonstrate technical leadership with their cloud compute infrastructure. EC2 is now offering native Windows support, a fantastic SLA and more controls for increased enterprise adoption. Congratulations to the team at Amazon Web Services. Sonian, and our customers, reap the benefits of your hard work for our hosted email archiving service.






10/25/08--10:14: New OEM partner for Sonian Hosted Email Archiving: Mailtrust (chan 1460595)

We have some exciting news to tell you about. Mailtrust is our latest OEM partner and we are thrilled to be working with Pat and Bill and the entire team in Blacksburg, VA.
Sonian technology will be powering their new hosted email archiving service. Watch the announcement video here.






11/02/08--05:59: IT budgets will propel cloud-compute based solutions (chan 1460595)

At certain times in the evolution of IT trends, there is a tipping point which dramatically accelerates the future. In recent memory Netscape did this for the Internet, and more historically Microsoft did this for the whole era of personal computing. In the last three years Amazon Web Services accelerate cloud-scale adoptions. Tipping point companies or technologies, which move the industry forward in great leaps, will help organizations do more for less IT budget dollars.

Today's troubling financial situation will be the tipping point that drives adoption of cloud compute based services. CFOs will be looking to save money, and the cloud's model of transparency, pay as you go, and pay for what you consume, is a refreshing change away from expensive monolithic closed proprietary software solutions.


Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. The payoffs could be noticeable during the current economic downturn.


Sonian is your partner in this seismic shift. We bring the world's first cloud compute based hosted email archive service to market. We are here to help solve your archiving needs with our unique service.






11/03/08--04:41: Should your email archive be in the cloud? (chan 1460595)

Microsoft has put their muscle into the "cloud." Azure, while still more concept than reality, shows corporate IT the cloud is a viable place to host some or all of a companies' infrastructure.

Email and collaboration, by the nature of how they need to be available 24x7 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.







11/03/08--05:05: Visualize your search and e-discovery experience (chan 1460595)

"Time is money" - the age-old axiom is now relevant more than ever. More data to analyze, less time for the task, and now less budget money for IT.

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.






11/06/08--07:54: Enterprise 2 Cloud - Migrate your legacy archive to Sonian cloud solution (chan 1460595)

The need for archiving and eDiscovery has been around for over ten years and many forward thinking companies recognized the benefits of implementing email archiving years ago. These trailblazing companies who purchased installed email archiving solutions are unfortunately paying for this decision.



Most companies that implemented an email archiving system over the past ten (10) years had limited options available; install on-premises software solution. Installed software requires the implementation and management of additional hardware, databases, storage and third-party software before a company can recognize the benefit of the solution.



While the email archiving installation worked fairly well during the first couple years, these companies are now faced with great pain in keeping this internal resource on with this internal resource. "When these implementations took place, the hardware and storage requirements were typically designed for 3-5 years of growth. However, these specifications were based on faulty assumptions and did not properly account for email growth after the date of implementation. The trends for email usage has skyrocketed in recent years and now includes more rich text-based email with large file attachments and media files.

Sonian is here to help you move your current installed software to a cloud-based solution.






11/07/08--08:32: AWSome! - We're a finalist in the AWS Startup Challenge (chan 1460595)

Sonian's cloud compute powered archiving service, running on the AWS infrastructure, is a finalist in the 2008 Startup Challenge.

We're looking forward to some spirited business competition with the other finalist, and congratulate all the other companies that made the cut.






11/08/08--07:08: Lessons Learned: Processing millions of messages in the cloud (chan 1460595)

Our cloud-compute powered hosted email archiving service is truly a marvel of efficiency and reliability. The system process millions of messages, and we have learned a great deal over the last eighteen months about scalability, parallel computing, and helping our customers do more with less IT budget dollars. The processing engine (see right*) indexes, encrypts and stores across an infinite pool of on-demand CPU resources. *(We jest about the mechanical engine, but if it were 1900 this is what our system would look like :) )

Cloud computing is also ushering in a new era of transparency and accountability between IT vendors and customers. The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because snafus in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises business solutions. When a cloud compute service has a problem, everyone knows. And let's face facts: no IT (cloud or on-premise) solution is immune to problems, but cloud systems by their very nature recover more quickly and are built with true 24x7x365 design goals. Cloud-powered SaaS is the equivalent of a 24 hour news cable channel with millions of daily viewers. The iconic TV test pattern can't display for very long without losing the audience.

We look forward to the competition from on-premise vendors and their reliability claims compared to cloud-powered SaaS. As a point of reference, according to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email-related solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month. Hosted services provide much better up time, on average, than software/appliance based solutions.






11/18/08--06:00: New regulations will burden IT on compliance (chan 1460595)

2009 and beyond will bring increased oversight on business communications and the IT department will have to meet these new challenges to archive and make available all electronic correspondence in a timely manner.

This is the role of an enterprise archiving system, designed to store the huge volume of information generated in the email systems each year. IT decision makers should look at the new generation of hosted archiving services, especially cloud-powered SaaS services that solve the archiving problem more securely and cost effectively than legacy hosted infrastructures.






12/13/08--05:20: Backup versus Archive: Redux (chan 1460595)

This is not your archive.

This is your backup, maintained in the event you need to recover a file or an entire server. Backups are tape libraries or backup to disk infrastructures. They are not designed for investigative search or analysis.

Archive and backup are cousins to each other, with archive providing the search, e-discovery and work flow capabilities that backup systems do not. Maybe some day in the future combined systems will solve both problems, but the state of the art today is separate systems, with backup maintained on premise, and archive hosted on cloud compute infrastructure.

Local backup and hosted archive is the "win win" scenario IT needs to save money, provide actionable intelligence, and solve the dual needs of search and data recovery.






12/16/08--05:17: Perspective: Of power plants and server rooms (chan 1460595)

Would you want to be responsible for generating your own electricity? Probably not. Soon the question will be do you want to be responsible for managing your own compute infrastructure? Over time you will decide "probably not."
It's not such a leap to anticipate in the coming years managing a Windows server or an email server on Linux might not be the best use of your IT budget given more pressing problems to be solved. Software as a Service, powered by cloud compute infrastructure, is the next big wave of IT innovation rushing to our shores. With cloud compute, you let others manage your base infrastructure and pay for the resources you consume. The costs scale linear to usage, and you can focus on the more value-add applications to your organization's needs.






12/22/08--09:50: Piecast: Email archiving market to double by 2011 (chan 1460595)

Several trends for 2009-2011 in the email archiving market.

First, the market for archiving will expand from $600 million today to $1.5 billion by 2011. This is seen in pie chart top left, and is predicted by Osterman Research.

Second, 60% of this growth will occur in the small to medium enterprise segment, with more than 70% choosing a hosted service instead of on premise software. The second and third pies indicate this trend.

Sonian's hosted email archiving service will get a big percentage of the archiving pie. :)






01/02/09--19:40: Happy New Year! (chan 1460595)

Team Sonian wishes our customers and business partners a healthy, happy and prosperous 2009.

We're starting the new year on a bright note with new enhancements, more OEM channel partners and stay tuned for some great new features we're creating in our cloud-compute powered hosted email archiving laboratory.






01/06/09--19:31: Forrester predicts over half of enterprises will choose hosted services (chan 1460595)

Forrester released a very interesting messaging analysis report predicting trends and costs for hosted email versus on-premise.

For companies with less than 15,000 employees hosted had significant savings compared to installed software solutions.

But an even more interesting finding is that more than half of enterprises will blend hosted email services with on-premise email servers. Hosted security and email archiving services are the perfect compliment to an Exchange, GroupWise or Notes server.






01/11/09--04:45: "Reply to All" Email Storm Hits US State Department (chan 1460595)

Ask any seasoned email administrator of a large organization and you'll hear a particular tail of woe about a "reply to all" email storm that clogged their message servers and spread like wildfire from one errant "sparking" message. It's the perfect storm of poor technology, poor human behavior, and lack of training.

The United States Department of State had their own "email storm," resulting in this edict:


"A cable sent last week to all employees at the State Department's Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified "disciplinary actions" for using the "reply to all" function on e-mail with large distribution lists."


Not a bad beginning to retraining employee behavior to think twice (or three times) before making a single click "reply to all" and pouring more gasoline on the smoldering email firestorm. While the email storm is a mild inconvenience to the employee, it's hugely disruptive for the IT staff. Hours are wasted clearing queues and nursing the system back to health.

Email, more than any other electronic communication medium, allows free and open communication between colleagues, but this incredible power needs be to wielded carefully because it's so abused now. Poorly written message bodies & subject lines and writing flames that would never be said in person are just a couple of the many downsides to this powerful capability.

We're moving into the "post email world" as 2009 starts. More and more people are demanding better email technology, and as the technology is overhauled to work more efficiently, the users need to take more responsibility by using email effectively. The vendors and the users both need to have some "skin in the game." Services like Twitter and Facebook messaging are getting more popular because email feels "so broken" right now.

In Sonian Labs we're innovating on some really interesting concepts about email productivity. As a hosted email archiving vendor we are in an unique position to have a positive effect on the future of email. Stay tuned!






01/31/09--19:19: See us at these conferences (chan 1460595)

Greg Arnette speaking about the pros and cons of using stubbing with your archive solution:




George Nichols speaking about cloud computing start-up economics:







Greg Arnette speaking about cloud computing and working with Amazon Web Services: