Four Benefits of On-Premise Archiving Solutions
Do you have hundreds of photos on your personal laptop and cellphone? Photos of your loved ones, your kids, pets, adventures, celebrations and vacation memories? You know you need to back them up, but where do you do it? Do you purchase a physical hard drive or do you upload them to the cloud? If you’re having concerns about either option, imagine what today’s IT personnel have to face on a daily basis. In their case, it’s not personal archives they risk losing, but sensitive, business-critical data of entire corporations, government agencies and financial giants.
The IT community is equally polarized — cloud or on-premise? What’s more affordable? What’s more secure? Is the age of hardware gone? We have answers to all of these questions, but let’s start from the beginning.
What Is an Email Archive?
An email archive is a standalone IT application that connects or integrates with company email systems, such as Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 or Lotus. But an email archive doesn’t just accumulate hundreds of thousands of emails over its lifespan. In addition to storing thousands, even millions of corporate email messages, the archiving system logs and indexes each item. This allows for efficient search in case of eDiscovery requests (when email data is needed for legal reasons) or when a user is looking for a particular message in their email history. This data is kept securely within the application and is completely tamper-proof.
Why do companies implement email archiving solutions? Some businesses may simply want to protect critical data. On the other hand, organizations operating in regulated industries need to archive email because they have to meet very strict regulatory compliance requirements and protect themselves from litigation. Major laws and regulatory bodies such as FINRA and HIPAA mandate the retention of electronic records and fines for non-compliance often exceed $1 million. Without a proper email archive, looking for a particular conversation in millions of emails in a litigation case does not only take a lot of time, but costs a lot as well. The average cost to companies during an eDiscovery case is $1.8 million, while several Fortune 1000 companies pay $30 million for eDiscovery annually.
In addition to compliance and eDiscovery benefits, having a separate email archive alleviates company email servers and frees valuable IT time. The global market for information archiving is growing and is expected to rise from $5.1 billion to $8.4 billion by 2022 (The Radicati Group), which proves that archiving is more important to companies than ever before.
Archiving Solutions: On-Premise Appliance vs. Cloud
Email archiving on-site can be achieved through virtual machines or standalone appliances. Until recently, the global market for on-site archiving was approximately 75% compared to a 25% uptake in cloud archiving. Clearly, these percentages have changed considerably in the last couple of years, but not everyone is happy about the cloud trend. While cloud has a much-touted “easy-to-deploy, easy-to-maintain” reputation, it can be unreliable, and with something as important as an email archive, most businesses are opting to stay on-location with their archive.
Control, Security, Reliability
The major reason why tech leaders advocate on-premise appliances is that they are in total control of the archiving process and, more importantly, the data that resides in the archive. Many IT managers, compliance officers and CIOs are aware that providers of hosted solutions, no matter how powerful their names sound, can’t take care of other companies’ data the way companies can do it themselves. With on-premise solutions, you have complete control, authority and responsibility to define what is archived, where to store it and how to enable or restrict access to archived data.
Cost Structure
High-quality archiving appliances contain enterprise-grade hardware and special data protection features that can make them costly. Moreover, companies need to purchase the whole on-premise archiving system up front, which, unlike cloud solutions, makes archiving a capital expense. Businesses need to be entirely certain that a particular solution suits them and has all the relevant features before they can decide to make the purchase. Conversely, cloud solutions are sold per mailbox and thus appear more affordable. However, very few (if any) cloud-based solutions can mirror the feature set typically available in archiving appliances, and their per-mailbox cost structure can be very misleading and always entails hidden costs that can be very difficult to predict.
Barriers and How to Overcome Them
In summary, there are three major barriers to the adoption of on-premise archiving solutions — there’s a growing perception that they’re outdated and unnecessarily complex, companies simply don’t want to bother with hardware maintenance and the cloud’s single-digit price per mailbox sounds inviting.
In reality, there are archiving companies that specialize in on-premise solutions, that have perfected both their systems and technical support and that can deliver excellent value for money. Although there are many legacy solutions whose software hasn’t been updated in years, solutions that are getting very difficult to maintain and poorly designed and complex systems that require extensive training and administrator time, 60% of tech leads still put on-premise before the cloud. They cite benefits such as reliability, security, greater functionality, tighter integration with email servers and LDAP, customization capabilities (add-ons for mobile, social media and file archiving, customizable user roles and policies etc.) and lower costs in the long run.
All Jatheon’s solutions are easily expandable, feature powerful server-grade hardware, offer easy integration with major mail clients and are backed by 24/7 monitoring and tech support, free hardware maintenance, free legacy data ingestion and free appliance replacement after four years.
When it comes to archiving appliances, it does pay to choose wisely. If you’re still evaluating your options or need more info on information archiving, read this white paper, contact us or schedule your personal demo.
Originally published at jatheon.com on June 11, 2018.
