Last month, Sonian attended a Virtual Trade Show hosted by TechWeb and InformationWeek. The theme of the event was, 'Modernizing IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance.' You can see pictures and even attend the event here. The show was a great success, and we loved being able to help people with their compliance questions and concerns.
During the event, we asked professionals who were visiting our booth to answer a few questions. As an email archiving provider, one of the more important questions we wanted to ask the large IT audience attending was, "do you have concerns about email archiving in the cloud?" Out of more than 200 IT professionals, 2/3rds said they were concerned about privacy protection and data control. Also, a majority of the survey participants responded to the follow up question, "Is there anything holding you back from leveraging the benefits of cloud computing? If so, what?" with some form of "security concerns." Sonian has a number of resources to help you better understand how cloud security works, so you can make a better educated decision about how to host your data archives.
- Browse through our blog to find out how we use 256 bit AES encryption to protect all your data.
- Read the MIT Technology Review to see how they answer the question, "Is the Cloud Safe?"
- Debate with The Economist magazine as they debate whether or not we should trust the cloud (Hint: Yes we can).
- Watch Greg Arnette at EduComm 2009 as he discusses The Future of Cloud Computing.
- Download the Amazon Web Services Security White Paper
- View the Security of Cloud Archiving Webinar
A recent survey of 1000 IT professionals revealed an alarming trend: 42 % of the respondents indicated they had to use email server backup tapes to recover messages for an investigation, and slightly more than half reported the recovery effort took 12 hours or more to find the requested information.
Since time = money, look at the 12 hours this way: Allocating the industry standard $175 / hour for IT labor costs, that single email recovery effort cost the business more than $2,100 (assuming just one person was working on the task.) Multiply that by the estimated 5 or more recoveries a year and the direct cost for not implementing archiving, and the resulting expenses far exceed the direct cost of a hosted email archiving service for a medium size company.
To learn more about the costs involved with Email Archiving, check out our archived webinar: "How Much does Email Archiving Really Cost?"
And if you are interested in the differences between cloud-powered email archiving and on-premise email archiving, check out the live webinar entitled: "Cloud Based or On-premise Archiving & eDiscovery" presented by Sonian and MindXChange this Thursday, March 11th at 2pm EST.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/677184120
The February 25 edition of The Economist included an insightful article, "Data, Data, Everywhere," about the digital information overload. It discusses the fact that the digital universe is growing faster than the capability to store this information. In the graph below you can see a representation of this phenomenon measured in Exabytes. (5 Exabytes = all of the words ever spoken by mankind.)
The business of information management-helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data is growing by leaps and bounds. In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.
Interesting factoids:
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Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes-the equivalent of 167 times the books in America's Library of Congress
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Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos.
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Decoding the human genome involves analyzing 3 billion base pairs-which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.
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The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore's law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months.
Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it "the industrial revolution of data". Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the "sexiest" around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them. If you would like to learn more about this topic, listen to our free, 10 minute video presentation entitled, "Growing your Data While Shriking Your Data Center."
For more information on Sonian Email Archiving visit our homepage at www.sonian.com
Demand nothing less than 256 bit AES encryption to protect your archive data. Sonian believes in a totally transparent attitude toward data encryption, and that is why we publish our security strategy on how we work 24x7x365 to ensure your information is retained and encrypted in a manner will satisfy any CSO.
Customer's trust their hosted email archiving to protect their information to the "n-th" degree. That's Sonian's mission.
If you want to learn more about your data's security, check out Sonian Founder and CTO in the his Cloud Security webinar.
Is your organization compliant with Massachussett's new data protection law? If your organization owns, licenses, or transmits personal information of an MA resident, you will need to encrypt the data. Massachussetts 201 CMR 17.00
goes went effect yesterday March 1, 2010.
This law requires companies "to take reasonable measures to control end-user access to sensitive data and to protect authentication information that can be used to gain access to the data." This applies to any company in any state that transmits personal information of an MA resident. If there is no attempt to encrypt the data, companies will be liable to be charged a fine of up to $5,000 for each breach and must pay the victims restitution.
What exactly constitutes personal information?
An MA resident's name in combination with any of the following:
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Social Security number
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Driver's license number
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Financial account number or credit or debit card number with or without CVV2 code
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State-issued identification card number
Sonian uses SSL encryption technology that is compliant with the new MA law. If you would like to learn about other new compliance regulations that may govern your organization, watch our CTO and Founder, Greg Arnette, conduct a screencast presentation about email archiving compliance:
Everybody loves free stuff, and today marked the start of Sonian's Twitter iPod Promotion. Sonian will give away an iPod Shuffle to one of its twitter followers on April 1st. All you have to do to be entered to win is Follow Sonian before midnight on March 31st (don't worry, if you are already following us you are automatically entered!).
Want more chances to win? Listen to Sonian on twitter all this month and we will let you know ways to increase your chances of winning. To get you started: hit the ReTweet button below and have your name entered a second time into the drawing.
One click and you have already doubled you chances of winning. Pretty easy huh? So follow us on twitter, help us spread the gospel about cloud computing and email archiving, tell your friends about us (especially if they work in the IT department), and even if the only blog post you ever retweet is this one... we still want you to win a new iPod. Not a bad deal. And what if you are not a fan of the iPod Shuffle - no big deal, it is free. Keep it, or give it to a friend, but then check back in for next month's give-away.
Good Luck!
Barracuda Networks released a study of over 200 IT professionals about the adoption of email archiving solutions. Not surprisingly, nearly 82% of the respondents labeled email archiving as "important" or "very important" for their business. What was interesting was that over two-thirds of the respondents cited reasons other than compliance as their main reason for introducing an email archiving solution.
Some alternative reasons cited included: email retention as a best practice (15%), user access to archived email (21%), and the ability to provide access to old email when storage quotas are in effect (15%). To sneak in a quick Sonian plug to those 15% worried about storage quotas: Sonian offers UNLIMITED email storage and retention for the same, low monthly rate. Literally unlimited, and your plan won't change if you suddenly need 100x the amount of storage you started with. Ok i'm done, back to other interesting survey results:
- 48% of respondents said they have been involved in a litigation request that required email as part of the discovery process
- only 11% involved in a litigation request involving email had an archiving solution in place to assist with the discovery process (get an archiving solution in place now: Request a Demo!)
- 33% said it took up to 1 month to produce email as part of an e-discovery request without the help of an email archiving solution.(Cut that time down to under 1 minute with Sonian eDiscovery solutions)
- 38% were considering plans to implement a solution (a 10% increase from the previous year)
If you found this article interesting and need to learn more about email archiving, check out the whitepaper: Why Use Hosted Email Archiving, or if you are part of the 82% of IT professionals who think "email archiving is important for your business, request a demo of Sonian's email archive solution and visit our homepage to learn more.
Today Sonian posted its Webinar: Hosted Archiving for Microsoft Exchange to its website in an easier to view flash format. You can also view the video by clicking the link below:
http://www.sonian.com/video/sonian-webinar-hosted-email-archiving-for-microsoft-exchange-ms-exchange-archiving-video
Sonian is pleased to be partnered with Microsoft Exchange to provide value-added email archiving and eDiscovery services to the Microsoft Exchange Community.
Sonian provides Microsoft Exchange customers of all sizes with an affordable, scalable, secure and feature rich hosted email archiving and eDiscovery service. Sonian Archive is designed to help these customers satisfy the any of following requirements:
- Regulatory Compliance (SEC, FINRA, SOX, FRCP, etc)
- Litigation Support and eDiscovery
- Storage Resource Management
- Business Continuity and Best Business Practice
The Sonian Archive Service is an on-demand hosted service that requires the installation of no hardware or software at your location. Within a matter of minutes, you will be archiving your email automatically from your Microsoft Exchange to our safe and secure data centers.
- Unlimited Storage - Other vendors charge extra for hosted archive storage, which makes estimating true service costs near impossible. With Sonian, there are never any hidden fees and all our subscription plans include unlimited storage.
- All Data Searchable at All Times - Other hosted archive vendors, in order to keep their costs low, migrate your older data to offline or near-line storage systems. This dramatically increases the amount of time required to search. Sonian keeps all data online and immediately accessible for searches.
- No Training Required - Sonian user interfaces are intuitive for all skill set levels. Extensive self-service online training videos guide users through all tasks. Administrators use self-service web UI’s to configure the system without the need for systems engineers.
To learn more about the Sonian Archive Service, please complete please complete the contact form and a Sonian Account Manager will contact you promptly.
How Sonian and Microsoft Exchange Work Together?
Among all enterprise mail platforms, the Microsoft Exchange provides an easily configurable archiving option. Sonian supports all the configuration options within the Microsoft Exchange. Whether you chose to write the archived messages to a local folder or mailbox or stream them to an external address, Sonian allows you to be up and running with your Microsoft Exchange archiving within an hour.
Today Iron Mountain announced the purchase of Mimosa systems. On the surface it seems like a rather strange purchase (it does not follow their strategy of cloud storage since Mimosa is an on-premise archiving solution), but here are a few thoughts on what they are trying to accomplish: Iron Mountain wants to leverage their new tier 3 storage product to backup Mimosa's data archive. So to tap into Mimosa's 1,000 customers, they will have the Mimosa archiving solution "backed up" to Iron Mountain using their Virtual File Store solution.
That is one hypothesis on Iron Mountain's rationale. It was the best I could come up with as I struggled to find logic behind Iron Mountain's decision to purchase the on-premise storage provider. I am sure others here at Sonian will have something to say about this deal so check back for more Iron Mountain-Mimosa posts.
Mimosa Systems provides an on-premise archiving system for email, SharePoint data, and files.
Iron Mountain provides data management solutions including protection, archiving, recovery, protection, and eDiscovery. Mimosa Systems will provide on-premises archiving solution to compliment Iron Mountain’s cloud-based information management systems.
From TechCrunch: With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain gains 1000 more customers. Mimosa will be folded into Iron Mountain’s Total Email Management Suite. The president and CEO of Mimosa Systems, T. M. Ravi, will become chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital. Since its launch in 2003, Mimosa has raised close to $50 million in venture funding.
A recent InformationWeek State of Enterprise Storage Survey polled 331 IT professionals and found nearly half the respondents indicated they do not have enough storage resources to meet current and expected data demands this and into 2011.
This alarming trend is because employee and machine generated content is growing at an exponential rate, and the added requirements of compliance, and disaster recovery exasperate the issues facing IT mangers across small, medium and large enterprises.
Cloud-powered storage services for archival, information retention, disaster recovery, and long-term tier 3 needs are the best way for enterprises to retain massive amounts of data at historically low costs.
Check out Sonian's cloud-powered email archiving solutions to learn more about a better way to manage your data.