LiveOffice says it can improve e-mail archiving for small and mid-sized businesses as well as provide better backup and security with a new hosted offering called Mail Archive.
The privately held e-mail services provider believes SMBs, especially those in regulated industries, are eager for a technology that offers simple archiving without any hardware costs and peace of mind if and when e-mail retrieval is required.
“This not only provides a complete audit trail, but it takes care of the storage issue as well,” said LiveOffice national sales manager Anthony Seyboth, noting that the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, offering provides encryption, storage indexing and replication for disaster recovery purposes.
Mail Archive offers unlimited mailbox storage capacity.
“We’re not trying to be everything in terms of e-mail archiving, but help IT manage the Exchange environment and ensure e-mail security,” he said.
In pushing out a software-as-a-service archival tool, LiveOffice hopes to stay a step ahead of some formidable competitors in the SMB backup and storage space.
One is EMC (NYSE: EMC), which pulled in its SMB backup technology portfolio by purchasing Mozy. Another is security player Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), which is also offering a storage service and added to it last week with the acquisition of SwapDrive. IBM (NYSE: IBM) is another with storage service ambitions, thanks to its purchase of Arsenal Digital.
Vendor competition promises to spike, as the e-mail archiving market is predicted to swell from $1.7 billion to $6.6 billion by 2012, according to analyst firm Radicati Group.
Compliance mandates and efforts to better document business interactions are cited as main factors propelling companies to archive and better retain messaging files.
“They’ve [LiveOffice] taken a small jump ahead of those players [EMC, Symantec],” said Forrester Research senior analyst Jo Maitland.
A SaaS offering will appeal to SMBs, Maitland said, as it simplifies the challenges involved.
While more than a few e-mail archival tools are available, most are aimed at bigger enterprises and aren’t a good fit for SMBs, she explained.
“The smaller company doesn’t want to pay for the sophistication of those tools, as they don’t need such sophistication,” Maitland said.
Yet the SaaS model poses challenges, she added, as handing off critical data is still a concern for enterprises big and small.
Radicati research reports that more than 76 percent of all archiving offerings are now on-premises solutions, but hosted solutions are gaining favor thanks to their lower costs and easy deployment.
“E-mail is a critical application and enterprises need to ask about security with hosted services,” Maitland said. “They should ask the provider how are you securing my e-mail boxes, what procedures are you doing to lock down the data.”
LiveOffice, which has two e-mail archiving product lines aimed at mid to larger enterprises in the financial services space, said its track record in providing services for 7,500 clients and hosting 250,000 e-mail accounts is a clear indication that it provides good security.
“Our system encrypts messages and uses the journaling function to send copies to the LiveOffice Mail Archive, where they’re stored in two separate data centers,” Seyboth explained.
Users are provided access to all archived e-mail through a Web-based, Exchange-like interface.
“Right now SMBs are still trying to understand how to deal with the e-mail laws in terms of retention and discovery, but they’re realizing there is scrutiny around messaging files,” Seyboth said, adding that “most small enterprise don’t have security or IT staff to deal with the issue.”
“Searching through e-mail can be a ton of work, and they typically need to pull in expertise,” Maitland said.
“SMB mailboxes are growing at a ridiculous rate,” she said. “It can be difficult for small companies without Exchange experts to keep a handle on the growth, as well as back-end storage costs.”
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com