Why a Cloud Archive is the Best Email Archiving Solution for SMBs
After 2010, individual users started to turn to cloud-based solutions, and it wasn’t long before the email archiving community followed suit. The trend has been overwhelming, and robust, reliable, on-premise solutions were suddenly labeled as “obsolete”, “last-century”, “vintage” and “cumbersome”. On the other hand, cloud solutions were advertised as innovative, flexible, simple and scalable. Their advantages were reflected in ease of access, support for various devices including mobile, fast upgrades and bottomless storage.
In reality, cloud-based enterprise archiving isn’t for everyone. It would be a huge oversimplification to say that every business should swap their in-house archives for the cloud. In many large enterprises that prioritize security, IT managers feel more comfortable having complete control over the archiving process.
But what if you are a small business that still needs to observe compliance laws and wants to be e-discovery ready, but simply can’t afford a bulky archiving appliance and the IT department that goes with it? In that case, a cloud archive is the next best thing. Here are the top reasons why cloud-based archiving is the best option for start-ups and medium-sized businesses.
1. Cloud is cheaper for smaller companies
Most on-premise archiving solutions are a convenient choice for enterprises with 500+ employees. Such companies already have the IT infrastructure to support the on-premise setup and need considerable storage capacity. When you take into account all the benefits of in-house solutions and do the math, getting an archiving appliance will eventually be more cost-effective than archiving so many mailboxes in cloud environment.
However, cloud saves startups and medium-sized businesses a considerable amount of money. Email archiving requires great computing power, and cloud solutions allow small companies access to such power at an incredibly low cost. By adopting a cloud archive, companies are saving money that they would otherwise have to spend on servers, IT staff and powering up the archiving appliance. 8 in 10 companies that switched to the cloud archive believe that it will help their organization to reduce IT costs.
2. No IT infrastructure
To make cloud email archiving work, the company doesn’t need to have any IT infrastructure. This means that decision makers won’t have to invest in high-performance computers that an in-house archive requires. An on-premise setup requires periodical hardware refreshes, hardware renewal and software maintenance contracts. With cloud archiving, your organization won’t have to appoint IT personnel who would be in charge of setting up, managing and overseeing the solution.
3. Changing trends and legacy solutions
Email archiving is not a new practice. After more than a decade, chances are that every business is already archiving email one way or another. Many organizations that adopted software-based or on-premise archiving solutions early on find it increasingly hard to maintain their ageing archives. Moving your legacy data to the cloud does not only mean stepping up your archiving game in terms of trends, but also allows you to do away with legacy solutions that cost money to maintain and give headaches to your administrators.
A note of caution — not all cloud email archiving solutions can satisfy all companies’ needs. Before you decide to move your existing archive to the cloud, take the time to evaluate multiple archiving vendors. Remember to ask whether they charge for the ingestion of your legacy data, how they handle security breaches and what they are prepared to do to make your transition to the cloud as seamless as possible.
4. Access and flexibility
Apart from reducing the dependence on internal IT and cost-effectiveness, cloud allows users much more flexibility than traditional on-premise solutions. Fixed storage is the inherent problem that comes with all in-house archives. Although it’s possible to connect them into a cluster or expand storage (in Jatheon, this is easily done through an affordable expandability plan using Xpand modules), hardware solutions always entail fixed amount of storage to house your emails.
With cloud-based archives, companies can scale their capacity up and down based on their changing needs and avoid storing confidential and sensitive business information on devices that can easily be stolen.
Modern business often requires doing things on the go. In recent years, a large number of startups and small companies promote agility and do business from various continents, locations, devices and operating systems. Having an archive that can be accessed from anywhere is a major consideration for these companies, and cloud archives offer unmatched possibilities in this respect.
Jatheon is a global leader in email, social media and mobile communications archiving with 15 years of experience with regulated industries. This October, we’re launching a next-generation cloud archiving solution. To get a better idea of how email archiving began and what’s coming next, read this guide on the history of archiving.
Originally published at jatheon.com on September 3, 2018.
