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Use The Cloud To Protect Email
Cut Expenses & Headaches While
Archiving Messages
Perhaps the most overused, ill-defined, and oft-misunderstood
technology term of the past year is cloud computing. In fact,
according to Gartner’s seminal model for categorizing new
technologies, cloud computing now sits at the apex of the Hype
Cycle—the precarious “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” In many
respects, the cloud is just the latest buzzword for established
online services formerly known as SaaS, on-demand software, or ASPs
(application service providers).
Perhaps the most common consumer-based online service is email—no
sane individual would dream of running their own mail server when
Web-based accounts are free, reliable, and full-featured. Likewise,
a burgeoning industry has emerged providing email services to
business. Yet many IT managers aren’t ready to take the plunge and
completely outsource such a critical application. However, building
a highly reliable, scalable email infrastructure that can meet
ever-increasing usage is expensive.
“Traditional methods carry heavy facility, hardware, software, and
personnel requirements, and the capital and operating expenditures
can be significant,” write Forrester Research analysts Stephanie
Balaouras and Christopher Voce in a recent report. They note that
making a total commitment to the cloud isn’t the only option. “You
could solve the entire message continuity and recovery challenge by
simply hosting your messaging infrastructure in the cloud, but if
you currently have and plan to continue to have a premise-based
deployment of your messaging infrastructure, cloud services for
message continuity and recovery can address some of the core
challenges of doing it yourself—a hybrid solution.” Nick Mehta, CEO
of LiveOffice (www.liveoffice.com)
believes that, “Using the cloud as a backup or archive is a great
way to test out the concept even if you don’t want to move all your
email there.”
Basic Architecture & Topology Of “Hybrid” Approach
In the hybrid architecture, IT still operates an internal,
enterprise email system, such as Exchange or Domino, but replicates
all email traffic to a service provider. “It’s like having a second
copy of the data online,” says Mehta. Should a company’s internal
systems fail, the service provider can take over as the primary MTA
(message transfer agent), storing and queuing all in- and outbound
traffic. Once internal systems are back online, the cloud service’s
queued messages are forwarded for redelivery.
Message backup and archiving are the core features most users look
for with email cloud services, with some vendors stopping right
there. Mehta actually sees four distinct applications for auxiliary,
cloud-based email services: data retention, message search or
e-discovery, personal message backup, and business continuity. With
more companies subject to regulatory requirements or potential
litigation necessitating access to past email, automated archiving
and discovery have become important requirements for internal email
services.
Likewise, most people are email packrats, but the cost of storage
systems and management are nontrivial, particularly for SMEs.
“Storage may be cheap,” says Paul Banco, CEO of MXSense (mxsense.com),
“but you’re always going to need to buy more.” So, many companies
just move the storage management problem to a service provider; for
example, Mehta sees many customers offloading all but the past 30 to
90 days of mail to a service provider.
Mehta and Banco both say SMEs are a core customer group for cloud
email services, with Banco seeing particular interest from
businesses facing compliance requirements and the resultant need for
significant storage capacity.
Cost Drivers & Trade-Offs
Rates for cloud email services are typically a monthly subscription
based on the number of archived mailboxes and/or the total storage
footprint. According to Balaouras and Voce, “The cost per mailbox
depends on how many services you subscribe to. Do you want simple
continuity of service? Data recovery? Archiving? Emergency
communication? Each additional service adds to the cost per mailbox.
Pricing can range anywhere from $5 to $10 per mailbox and $3.50 to
$6 per GB of storage.”
Selection Criteria & Recommendations
When evaluating cloud email providers, the Forrester analysts advise
looking beyond mere cost calculations to consider a vendor’s
infrastructure resiliency, security technologies, and administrative
controls. They add, “Beyond ensuring that your data will be
encrypted in flight and at rest, you should also ask your service
provider if it has a SAS 70 Type II certification as well as
certifications for ISO standards, such as ISO 27001/27002, that
spell out specific auditing requirements for hosting and securing
customer information.” Aside from standard SLAs, Mehta also
encourages customers to ensure they maintain ownership and control
over their data—what he terms “a client bill of rights.”
Cloud customers can also save money by not over-specifying service
levels and avoiding lumping users into a one-size-fits-all solution.
Balaouras and Voce note that the difference between guaranteed 100%
availability and living with the occasional short outage could mean
thousands of dollars. Likewise, they say “take a hard look at the
recovery requirements for different segments of your user
population; it’s likely that large groups of users might need
continuity of service but don’t necessarily require access to their
historical emails—and there could be opportunity to cut down on
cost.”
The cloud may be over-hyped, but cloud services are rapidly evolving
and are particularly appropriate for mature, standard services such
as data backup and email continuity. Aside from the convenience of
almost instant deployment and access to advanced capabilities beyond
the reach of many SMEs, cloud services can make financial sense by
obviating the need for large capital expenditures and additional IT
staff.
Key Points
• Many enterprises have substantial investment in email systems and
are unwilling or uneasy with outsourcing all of it to an online
service provider. For these, a hybrid approach, using the cloud for
backup/archiving, redundancy, and disaster recovery makes sense.
• While message archiving is the fundamental and popular purpose of
cloud email services, optional capabilities include information
management, e-discovery, message filtering, business continuity, and
disaster recovery.
• Pricing for cloud services is subscription-based with rates tied
to the number of mailboxes, total storage consumed, or both.
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