Greg Arnette, Sonian founder and CTO, recently did a PodCast interview with Cloud Computing expert, David Linthicum. David Linthicum is the CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, and an internationally known distributed computing and application integration expert.
This is the fifth installment of David's interview with Greg. Listen in to learn even more about Sonian! This week, the focus is on pricing and the technical knowledge required from Sonian's customers before installing the service.
David Linthicum:
What is your pricing model? What kind of companies can benefit from your services? Cloud you walk me through the economics?
Greg Arnette:
The service is appropriate in the first time to medium-sized enterprises. But, the power of the cloud allow Sonian to take advantage of horizontal scalability. It can offer its services to small, medium or large companies.
There is no constraint by capacity. Sonian can handle the need of a 10,000 employees company as well as a 10 persons company and bring the same efficiency and scalability.
The pricing model is very simple and much cheaper than an on-premise solution; it's priced per-employee per-month. The archiving service ranges from $3 to $5 per-user per-month depending upon different discounts available based on the size of the organization.
The service includes unlimited storage, so there is no kind of hidden storage fee at the end of the contract. Basically, an organization just need to sign up and go! It makes it very simple, it is part of the new theme seen in the market place around frictionless IT.
Sonian archiving service allows companies and IT managers to focus on business-related issues adding value to their business and let companies like Sonian focus on things that need to be done but don't need to be seen as a critical thing that the IT department manages itself.
This is the perfect outsourcing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment of using cloud computing, SaaS, web-based technology to solve this e-governance and information-governance pain point.
David Linthicum:
How much technical knowledge does Sonian need from their clients before installing Sonian's archiving system?
Greg Arnette:
Installing Sonian's archiving solution is a real quick and easy task to do. It requires almost the same basic knowledge as as to administer an Exchange server or any kind of email server technology.
Sonian can lock down connections between customer's on-premise network and the slice of the cloud Sonian operates from. You basically turn on journally on the Exchange server. The customers can decide to have their information being pushed with secure SMTP with TLS or Sonian can fetched the data over a secure email protocol like IMAP or POP.
It really matches into the security and access designs that modern enterprises are employing these days, as they realize that, a lot of their workers are going to be leveraging company IT assets by working on remote devices.
In essence, we can think about the cloud as kind of being purposed into a very specific solution set and it is not this sort of idea of the big wide open public cloud; it is just a mass of computer horsepower and storage technology that can be harnessed to solve this pain point.
Customers can take advantage of Amazon import service. It allows customers to ship physical media and the data that can be encrypted on this media to a secure processing facility. With the Sonian workflow added on to that Amazon import service, that information on physical media can be uploaded into the cloud in matter of days.
It is a really quick way to get terabytes and terabytes of legacy data from on-premise systems to the cloud, without having to worry about the capacity of a T1 line or the data center connection from the customer to the hosted service, thanks to high-speed data transitioning from on-premise to the cloud.
Sonian also has a remote web service giving the customer the authorized access to a certain part of the internal network from the coud.
That's it for this week. Part 6 is coming next week. You will have the opportunity to learn even more about Sonian and its Hosted Email Archiving Solution.
Here are the links to the previous blog posts:
Part 1 - Sonian's technology / Issue solved
Part 2 - Typical customer
Part 3 - Security in the cloud
Part 4 - What customers need to prep for to be successful?
Part 6 - Sales/adoption process & future for Sonian's technology
Hosted by Cloud Computing expert David Linthicum, this podcast is a no-hype look at the world of Cloud Computing, focusing on how to prepare the traditional enterprise to leverage resources outside of their firewalls. This podcast talks about what's new, what's working, and has expert guests, including Sonian CTO Greg Arnette, who will provide you with the advice you need to be successful in the clouds.
If you were to change your archiving system today, assuming that you already have one, where would you direct your choice? Would you still invest tremendous amount of time, personel and money in upgrading/developing an on-premise solution; would move toward a hybrid solution or would you make the jump and adopt a cloud-based archiving solution?
Michael Vizard in an ITBusinessEdge’s article entitled “A Smarter Way to Archive” pointed out how painful it is to build an archiving system for an organization. Indeed, Almost any organization which wants to build its own archiving system has to face several, non-negligible challenges:
- First, it has to decide what its needs/wants to archive, whether it’s emails, files, instant messages, SMS, voicemails or a combination of the cited elements.
- Then, depending on the industry the company falls in; it will have to deploy some kind of eDiscovery tools, which would allow the company to be reactive and able to provide the required data in case of litigation or eDiscovery request.
- An Email Retention Policy is a must have for any organization, especially when designing an archiving system. Any organization should have some policies, clearly communicated and understood through the entire organization, defining the rules/processes regarding data storage/retention.
- Last but not least, all organizations, especially those falling in the following industries: finance, educational, government institutions and healthcare, have to be regulatory compliant. What does this mean? It means that organizations must have an archiving solution allowing them to have some control over their retention policy and must be able to prove that the data is safely stored for the legally required period.
These are lot of parameters to take into account when an organization decides to build its own archiving system, and I’m not even focusing on organization doing business in heavily regulated industries such as financial services which has to comply with ever more regulations (such as SEC, FINRA, NASD, GLBA…)
So the outcome is that most IT departments want to skip archiving because it can be a real headache for IT to put all the pieces together. It is like buying a kit car. When you buy a kit car, you are really excited by the results you foresee. But what you don’t realize, especially when you are not an expert, is the time, money and overall resources you will need, to reach you goal in a timely & efficient manner.
Archiving should no longer be thought as a complicated, should have, but an easy to implement, scalable must have. The best solution available nowadays is outsourcing this IT pain to archiving experts; moving from expensive on-premise solutions to cheap hosted solution. In the mean time, while outsourcing this archival pinpoint, why not taking advantage of the latest technologies out there and move your data to the cloud!
If you are still persuaded that an on-premise solution is the best fit for your organization, think about the “kit car” analogy again. It will last maybe 2 or 3 years, if you are lucky, but then it will start to fall apart and you will need to upgrade it, buy a new engine, new panels to keep it running... Organizations thinking about building archiving systems should outsource this archival pinpoint to cloud-powered archiving experts like Sonian and it will be as easy as leasing a car!
Download the Webinar presented by Greg Arnette, Sonian founder & CTO to see the advantages of using a Hosted Email Archiving provider rather than archiving your emails with an on-premise solution.
What would you think if I asked "how would you feel about improving your email retention policy, improving your storage management, and becoming fully compliant with government regulations, and save a bunch of money while doing it?" Your gut reaction might be, "Arnaud, you sound like the data storage equivalent of a used car salesman, but can you really do all that while reducing my email costs?" In short answer, Yes. You can't get more simple than that. Just forget about PST files, server management, hardware, software - forget it all, and jump to the cloud with a SaaS email archiving provider. There are many reasons why an organization should move their data to the cloud, starting with their email. So, as an addendum to a previous post, the Top 7 Reasons for Email Archiving, I will focus on the benefits of email archiving from a cost efficiency standpoint.
The Top 7 Ways to Reduce Your Email Costs
- Eliminate IT infrastructure spending. Moving to a cloud-based archiving service allows an organization to free itself from the hassles of an on-premise system. You don't have to pay anymore for hardware and infrastructure. You don't need to pay for updating software, increasing computing power and bandwidth, or for equipment replacements in case of a failure. A SaaS archiving service, can offer a pricing plan on per-user, per-month basis which allows organizations to easily forecast its IT costs.
- No more expensive downtime. With the cloud, your archived data is available 24/7 and anywhere in the world as long as you have a access to the Internet. If you are running on an on-premise system, server downtime could take hours to get back up to full speed which could cost an organization thousands, sometimes millions of dollars if mailboxes were to be unavailable for a business day. Everybody knows how companies don't just rely on email, they survive by it. Think of those times when your email servers have gone down for a few hours, how helpless you felt. Now imagine not having to worry about that again. You don't have to imagine with a cloud-hosted service.
- Pay-as-you-go! A cloud-based archiving service allows an organization to reach unmatched level of scalability. With payments made on a per-user basis, you can easily budget IT expenses (as long as you can predict the number of users). There are no unexpected costs associated with a hosted email service. Moreover, if you need more storage space, you just need to say the word - you don't need to buy new hardware.
- Costs stay flat as the performance needs increases. Sonian, for example, uses Amazon Web Services to provide its cloud offering. The way Sonian has developed its grid computing infrastructure technology to utilize the AWS cloud, customers have a 99.99% SLA agreement, guaranteeing maximum performance, no matter what usage you require. Suppose your company is experiencing its busiest day of the year, an on-premise system could experience lag time due to limited bandwidth, or you could end up having to make a capital expenditure to increase computing power - only to find that equipment lying dormant until it is needed again. With a hosted solution, unlimited scalability allows you to instantly increase or decrease your computing power, for no extra cost, so you will still be able to seamlessly operate your email system, even on your busiest of days.
- Reduce your IT expenditures. So far, when talking about an on-premise archiving system we have only addressed the high upfront costs for software and hardware, but you also have to take into account the labor costs. IT staff will have to set up the system, install everything and be properly trained to be able to operate and maintain the system as efficiently as possible. This time spent setting up an on-premise system, training IT staff, and maintaining the servers is time that doesn't have to be spent. A hosted email archive allows you to free your IT department from installation headaches and training; instead, your companies IT staff can focus on other issues that can actually add value to your business. Some hosted solutions can be deployed in minutes and have a very user friendly UI that requires little-to-no training.
- Improve storage management. A hosted archiving solution can offer organizations the opportunity to dramatically improve their data storage management. A comprehensive archiving tool will ensure regulatory compliance, and allow an organization to set up and maintain a compliant email retention policy that allows your emails, IM, SMS, Social Media and other business communications to be safely stored, readily available, and easily retrievable (with solutions that offer advanced searching features and indexing... like Sonian :). In-house tools too often do not integrated well and can quickly become expensive to upgrade to make sure they are still up-to-date.
- No more hours on the phone spent with the Help desk. Imagine that! No more painful and endless phone calls with the help desk to retrieve emails that are either lost, deleted or in quarantine where the end-user doesn't have access. A hosted/SaaS archiving solution can allow the end-user to have an unlimited, permanent access to his/her personal archive and access to other archived files depending on his/her level of authorization. Administrators can put legal holds on public folders so that, in case of an litigation or e discovery request, the archived emails cannot be modified, deleted or altered by unauthorized users. Such a solution also brings added-value features such as reporting & analytics tools, auditing tools, comments, flagging, tracking an email's history... and other features that ensure great visibility into the archived content. This accessibility will free up time (and time is money) spent mulling over an antiquated archive - or worse yet, on the phone with a help desk, mulling over an antiquated archive.
I'll admit, I am a little biased, and a lot of the features of a "hosted archiving solution" were based on Sonian's offerings, but I'm sure our competitors offer (at least) some of what I described above. If you want to learn more about cloud-based email archiving and the advantages of a SaaS archiving solution, feel free to download the (unbiased) Osterman Research white paper below:
Download the Free White Paper: Why Use Cloud-Powered Hosted Email Archiving, In it, you will learn: Why you should archive your content, why hosted archiving makes sense, and the key issues to consider in selecting an email archiving vendor.
Article written by Arnaud. Edited by Alec.
In all the critical categories, the cloud continues to beat out on-premise alternatives. Despite this, many remain skeptical, citing security of the cloud infrastructure. For the few of you out there who are still wrestling with the idea of adopting the cloud, in May of 2010, AberdeenGroup released a white paper which should allay many doubts and concerns about security in the cloud.
When services, such as SaaS(Software as a Service), IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service), and PaaS(Platform as a Service), are offered in the cloud, countless questions arise regarding ownership of applications, networks, storage, hosts, and data. Does the company have ownership? Does the service provider have ownership? To clarify, the service provider has full ownership over the infrastructure for networks, storage, and hosts. The service provider may also assume full or partial ownership over the application infrastructure. As for the data, the company always has ownership, but not direct control. This loss of direct control over data instills uncertainty in consumers about the integrity and security of their sensitive information. However, the results of Aberdeen's 12 month analysis between on-premise and cloud-based archiving security strongly favored Cloud-based Archiving.
Aberdeen's analysis of 36 companies over a 12 month period, on-premise suffered from; 26 Malware infections, 9 Website compromises, 11 Data Loss/Data Exposure incidents, 11 security related downtime incidents, and 30 audit deficiencies.
Over the same twelve month period, the sample group of 22 Organizations that used Cloud-based services logged; 11 Malware infections(Cloud Advantage 58%), 2 Website Compromises(Cloud Advantage 78%), 6 Data Loss/Data Exposure(Cloud Advantage 45%), 6 Security-Related Downtime incidents(Cloud Advantage 45%), and 2 Audit Deficiencies(Cloud Advantage 93%).
Having had 5 fewer Data loss incidents, at $640,000 per incident, translates into $3 million in cost avoidance. 28 fewer Audit Deficiencies, at $7,000 per incident, translates into $200,000 in annual cost savings. These are just a few of the pro-cloud findings in the 2010 Aberdeen White Paper, Web Security in the Cloud: More Secure!, Compliant! Less Expensive!
Based on these numbers, cloud-based computing and archiving is; less expensive, more compliant, more reliable, easier to maintain, and now more secure. It seems as though it is becoming more difficult to find reasons not to adopt a cloud-based archiving solution.
Full of webinars, research reports, magazine articles, and video clips to educate you on how to keep your business safe when adopting the cloud.
In the legal world, it seems that lawyers are pointing fingers at eDiscovery as THE key contributor to waste in cases. Electronic discovery is cited as one of the biggest money wasters in the business. There are ways to save with eDiscovery, but they are easily ignored. If the general consensus is that eDiscovery is responsible for the majority of wasted time and resources, why haven't they done anything about it?
The sad truth is roughly 70% of money spent on eDiscovery is wasted because, more often then not, lawyers are oblivious as to the efficient eDiscovery practices. Instead of acknowledging eDiscovery as a process that needs reform, the legal world calls for a reform of rules and regulations. Craig Ball, in the EDD Update, compared the current approach to eDiscovery to re-arranging chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic, as opposed to filling the lifeboats.
It's time to catch up with the technology of today, and embrace useful eDiscovery solutions. If there is any single motivational factor encouraging lawyers to adapt, it's the high volume of digitial evidence. If lawyers continue to be lackadaisical in gathering digital information through eDiscovery, they might as well close down their practice, because a new generation of young, technologically savvy lawyers will quickly surpass their predecessors with new, faster, and less expensive eDiscovery solutions. Ultimately, either lawyers get with the eDiscovery program, or be replaced by those who don't still use stone tablets and chisels.
Calculating the true cost of operating an email system is an elusive art. Beyond direct software license and hardware expense is a grey area of storage, networking, bandwidth and staffing that all need to be apportioned to messaging costs.
In addition, employee hours spent managing (reading, sending, searching and organizing) their individual inboxes is estimated to increase from from 2.5 hours a day to 3 hours a day in the next two years.
Govtech.com provides a link to a email ROI cost estimator available from the Association for Image and Information Management (AIIM). AIIM released this “email return-on-investment (ROI) calculator tool” for CIOs and IT directors to help analyze true total cost of ownership for more accurate budgeting and planning purposes.
Download the Cost of Email Archiving Webinar, to learn the true cost of a hosted archiving solution, the best plans for your organization, and how to minimize your costs going forward.
Social Media is evolving the way we communicate, but Email still remains as the communication cornerstone in organizations today. To state the obvious, but since email is so widely used, there is a significant amount of data generated. The dilemma of what should be kept and what should be deleted poses problems for organizations from an IT and legal standpoint. For this reason email archiving is becoming more and more prevalent in organizations. Archiving possesses benefits for everything from legal compliance to disaster recovery. "Regulatory Compliance" and "Business Benefits" are two umbrella terms commonly referred to as the main drivers behind email archiving.
Regulatory Compliance is the need for email archiving driven by a need to meet federal, state, industry, or eDiscovery requirements. Since email is so critical to a business, legislators and regulators have higher requirements that must be met. Such requirements address the issues of what emails need to be kept, and for how long said email must be retained. The only problem is: with this legislation comes ambiguity and confusion. Most legislation states "electronic business communications" must be retained, and since the economic collapse of major financial firms, regulators have been even tougher on their policies (likely because the SEC found that in investigations some pertinent emails were "lost," or deleted). To avoid further tampering, regulators have made it clear that intentional tampering of email or records could leave the individual criminally liable. Needless to say, this is enough incentive to implement an email archiving solution. The other major issue with regulatory compliance is the retention period, which can rage from anywhere from 3-7 years. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 mandates a retention period of 5 years, meaning for 5 years emails must have a place in which to be stored and accounted for. In the event of an investigation, timely presentation of these records are crucial. The court's expectation of the records has drastically shortened, expecting emails to be provided in days. For IT departments this requires time and effort toward indexing and storing email so that they can be recalled in minutes. All these expectations require a suitable archiving solution so that all these compliance requirements be met.
On the flip side, 'business benefits' are advantages that an organization can gain from using email archiving like disaster recovery or data optimization. Email Archiving isn't something that has to be implemented forcefully due to strict regulations, it provides a range of benefits to organizations. Due to the importance of email, a system failure that causes the loss of emails is considered a disaster. In the event of such a disaster emails that are archived are safe and secure. In addition the ability to search for emails through an index provides swift eDiscovery and location of important email. And what if an individual accidentally deletes an important email? Archiving solutions provide the ability to locate and selectively restore that lost email, avoiding a potentially unpleasant situation. Finally, archiving solutions provides a more efficient and permanent way to archive messages without taking up valuable space on the actual email server.
On site archiving can be efficient for larger organizations or highly regulated industries, but they can be costly. Hosted archiving is a more cost efficient solution, providing data storage, eDiscovery, and compliance without the massive costs of hardware and servers.
Full of webinars, research reports, and case studies to educate you on data archiving best practices for your business organization.
A recent USAToday poll asked the question "What's your digital data worth?" (meaning the estimated value of your computer content, including photos, music and files.)
It's telling that over 25% of respondents reported their data is "priceless."
It's also telling that more than 60% value their data more than $300.
Cloud-powered archiving is the most affordable way to protect your digital data, so everyone can act like their data is priceless with no down-side consequences.
Download the Free White Paper: Why Use Cloud-Powered Hosted Email Archiving, In it, you will find the answers to: Why you should archive your content? Why hosted archiving makes sense? and What are the key issues to consider in selecting a vendor?
Petabytes of "legacy" data consume expensive on-premises storage resources.
Moving the data from a SAN to an archive appliance is not good enough. Too many risks from drive failure and theft/fire to be a viable solution.
It's time to develop a "data decommission" plan and move your legacy data to an affordable cloud-powered archive with built-in search and analytics.
Data protection, plus full-text search and analytics, are powerful incentives to choose cloud-powered SaaS archiving for your long-term archival needs.
Storage experts estimate the "all in costs" to storing archival data on a SAN average $10 per gigabyte per month. Contrast the $10 per gigabyte per month with cloud-powered options that are 90% less expensive and it's hard to find a reason not to decommission your legacy data right away.
Download the Cost of Email Archiving Webinar, to learn the true cost of a hosted archiving solution, the best plans for your organization, and how to minimize your costs going forward.
Computerworld posted a great web article on a NBC Universal case study on moving e-discovery work "in house."
The article reports that "NBCU tackled the costly and time-consuming [e-discovery] process and turned it into a cost-effective and more efficient system that has seen a 40-45 percent gain efficiency since its implementation."
Sonian is a big believer in self-service e-discovery and the cost-savings realized by using cloud-powered SaaS to manage long term email archives.
Download the Cost of Email Archiving Webinar, to learn the true cost of a hosted archiving solution, the best plans for your organization, and how to minimize your costs going forward.