With industry noise about email archiving, and hosted archiving in general, getting louder and louder, it can be difficult to find all the information you need to make a decision. To help you easily gather information, Sonian compiles relevant content together for you in the Cloud Archiving Monthly Market Update.
The Sonian Cloud Computing Market Update:
In Wood Country Wisconsin, teachers were ordered by the Circuit Court to hand over all emails, from both personal accounts and school account. This decision was overruled by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Court ruled that personal emails don't pertain to any governm
ent activity and therefor are not required to be turned over. In the opinion of the court, "To be a record ... the content of the document must have a connection to a government function. The teachers' personal emails have no connection to a government function and therefore are not records." This verdict is one of many regarding message archiving and online media. As new scenarios arise in the world of online information, the
fog surrounding what information is public, private, professional, etc. will slowly begin to lift as court decisions like this one set precedents that will govern how we regulate our online communication.
This past April, fellow Sonianite, Don Wood and I took the opportunity to ascend 14,000 feet into the clouds and jump out of an airplane. Our initiative that day, although not innovative in and of itself, was received with wild excitement and enthusiasm. Months later another initiative is attracting a similar response. On July 19, 2010 Sonian partner Rackspace, Inc. (collaboratively with NASA and other industry leaders) unveiled to the world their latest project initiative, OpenStack. The company announced the opening of their cloud infrastructure code, an unprecedented industry angle. The move to open source means big things for cloud computing capability, Sonian and the entire hosting industry.
Now, after our sky soar I confessed to Don, “mentally, my lights were on but nobody was home” while I was rapidly descending towards the beautiful New England landscape. Adrenaline aside, I did manage to run some rational thoughts through my mind during that jump – 1) I’m flippin’ flying (literally, flips!), 2) Man has conquered the clouds, and 3) the sky and its clouds have never been so accessible and free. Alliteration aside, it would be a stretch to relate that first thought to the news at hand, however the second two lend themselves quite nicely. OpenStack has revolutionized the market, and so has since driven me to revisit thoughts two and three.
First, with skydiving it is undeniable that mankind has conquered the clouds and with Sonian it is undeniable mankind has conquered the cloud. Next, with thought three I was admittedly incorrect. The OpenStack project has boldly set the sky free and only now can one say its clouds are truly accessible, open and free. Now the good news gets great – an open source cloud platform will equally allow hosted archiving solution providers such as Sonian to reach new heights. So what exactly is all the fuss?
What open cloud means for you:
- OpenStack aims to “foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability”
- Eliminate fear of proprietary lock-in
- Open source encourages industry innovation
- Allows increased cloud flexibility and elasticity
- More tools and better capabilities
- Streamline industry standards, innovation and technologies
What open cloud means for us:
- Ability to adopt public and private clouds (further encompassing the government, education, global, technology, etc… industries)
- Product and service competition, allowing our solutions to surface and shine
- Participate in open source! Allowing our engineers and developers to shine
- New partnership opportunities
Sitting here at Sonian, I am planning to someday skydive again. With the open source initiative underway I can rest assured the next time around thoughts two and three will be glorious and true. Then perhaps I can muster the ever-elusive thought four! Stay tuned.
Assuming you’re safely on the ground be sure to check out the project’s hub, OpenStack.org to discover how Rackspace is opening the skies like never before.
Phoenix Police Officer posts opinion about Senate Bill 1070 on Facebook
Social media sites, such as; Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, for good or for bad, have made their way from the personal world into the business world. Society's rapid acclamation to social media didn't allow for a formal line to be drawn between the two worlds. This indistinguishable grey area can be the cause of discrepancies in protocol.
In the case of Paul Dobson, a 20 year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department, these discrepancies have kicked the metaphorical bee hive. He chose to post a video of himself voicing his opinion about Senate Bill 1070 on a Facebook page for a project called “Cuentame,” or “Tell Me’ as it translates in English. The issue with him doing this is?... a police officer is supposed to get permission to speak to the media from a higher ranking officer. The issue lies in the fact that this group "Cuentame" says they are not the "media." This begs the question, what is the media? Well, according to Cuentame, social media is not the media. In this reinvented social era, it has become near impossible to separate the media, citizen journalists, and social media. With sites like TMZ, which is powered by citizen journalists, there remains a grey area which perpetuates the blurring line that seperates the multiple facets of media.
Cases like Officer Dobson's are relatively unimportant, but the decisions that have to be made for each unique scenario will begin to slowly form a line that one day either separate, or conjoin social media with the formal "media." Regardless of the outcome, compliance regulations have made it clear that social media communications in a business environment will be treated the same as Email with regards to governance. With this in mind, businesses and organizations (including the Phoenix Police Department), should be prepared by archiving social media communications.
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Since the emergence of cloud based services, there have been waves of doubt crashing on the shores of service providers world wide. We at Sonian continue to challenge the dissent and doubt directed at the misunderstood potential of the cloud because we, as well as our pioneer customers, know that cloud based technology and virtualization is the future of IT innovation.
Two days ago, on July 19, 2010, the following story broke on boston.com; South Shore Hospital, in Weymouth, MA had lost the personal information for roughly 800,000 people while in-transit to a contractor for destruction. The information on the missing files included; names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, medical record numbers, patient numbers, health plan information, dates of service, and information on diagnoses and treatments. This incident, which no one seemed to have anticipated or even considered as a possible outcome for the data destruction process, has proven itself to be a disastrous scenario. Because of this misstep, South Shore Hospital will be facing federal fines & penalties for non-compliance ranging from $50,000 to $200,000, but that isn't even the worst of it….
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA Privacy & Security Rules) provides federal protection of all health related information and provides patients with certain rights regarding the privacy of their personal information. These rights include, but are not limited to, the required consent before information is shared or distributed. If one feels their rights have been violated, that individual may file a complaint with their provider or health insurer, or file a complaint with the U.S. Government.
In the worst case scenario, the South Shore Hospital has subjected themselves to up 800,000 personal complaints against them, and must handle 800,000 individual settlements, not to mention the additional non-compliance fine. If South Shore Hospital had chosen to store their data within the cloud there wouldn't have been a need to transport and destroy that information. Using the infinite scalability and unlimited storage capacity the cloud offers, along with the proper indexing and archive service, these records could be stored for long periods of time without fear of data overload while still having the capability to be accessed instantly from multiple locations. Because the cloud can provide safe and secure storage for sensitive data for long periods of time, in addition to helping organizations comply with regulations such as; FINRA, SEC, HIPAA, and SOX, there is no need for data transit or destruction, and thus crisis averted for South Shore Hospital.
Download the Webinar: Meeting the HIPAA Compliance Challenges with Cloud Archiving to learn how you can protect yourself from data disasters like the one that happened to South Shore Hospital.
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.
From file cabinets and walls upon walls of backup tapes, the future is here with email archiving. Because the vast majority of business communication revolves around email, there is a rapidly decreasing demand for paper and tape indexing services. Yet this is not to say keeping records of communications isn't necessary, on the contrary, it is more critical than ever to keep an efficient and organized index of documents and emails. Hosted email archiving captures all emails inbound and outbound, and indexes them in a searchable and convenient data base.
Incorporating these services can protect your organization in a multitude of ways.
Three Benefits of Email Archiving
1) Disaster Recovery
Imagine the unfortunate circumstances of a major network failure: a rainstorm flooding your basement server room, a fire in your office building, any kind of disaster could be devastating if all your records and data is wiped. Hosted archiving keeps all your email safe in multiple offsite locations, Sonian archives it in the cloud. By doing this, your data is safe and can be easily retrieved if disaster recovery is needed.
2) Government Compliance
How does an email archive for compliance benefit your company? What if certain records and business documents are required for an ongoing investigation? You will have to dig through backups to recover those documents - most likely a string of emails. Your IT department will suffer if they have to waste valuable time on sifting through records in an unorganized index of backup tapes. A failure to produce these records, or emails, in the given amount of time, or a failure to produce them at all, will result in costly legal action. To avoid this catastrophe a hosted email archiving solution does not only protect your emails, but allows for simple and quick location of each email. With google-like search capabilities your IT department will locate these records in minutes. Crisis averted.
3) eDisovery
The indexing and eDiscovery capability of hosted email archiving can prevent lawsuits, but what about easing the burden for employees? Accidentally deleting emails or losing attachments happens to everyone, but recovering those files can be difficult for the unprepared. Hosted email archiving and eDiscovery can quickly search and recover lost files avoiding another taxing process for the IT department. Law firms use eDiscovery and archiving for litigation and managing emails for cases. While companies often use email archiving to manage the volume of their data while also creating a searchable index of communications.
“Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications.”
– FINRA Regulatory Notice (January 2010)
I cannot comment on a regulatory policy of USA, IANAL and I am an alien to boot. But this sure adds a layer in the social media communications that makes the businesses slightly slower to adopt/use. What the above means is that we have been ignoring the specific needs of the various regulated industries in Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, etc.
We now need to not only monitor the social media or have CoTweet/Hootsuite kind of tools, but also be able to provide archiving solutions for the communications happening via social media. Audit Trails from a programmatic perspective & archiving from a infrastructure perspective. Kind of makes sense why Dell claims that 90% of data saved by enterprises are not read again! ;)
However, we do not need to archive each & every tweet or friending happening on the social web, just those that emanate from the company & its people as its employees (am still not clear if an employee can use their personal account for personal reasons without having to archive).
Some vendors have cropped up to take advantage of this situation and the ensuing FUD:
Social Media Archiving is not an optional need in BFS, yet the current options (AFAIK) are cloud based (SaaS) offerings and BFS might not be ready for it yet. I am not aware of the complete industry, but the few biggies that I do know of, would not like to put such communications data into the cloud.
That concludes the article originally posted on the SFH Blog.
Now, I would be remiss if I did not bring up the fact that Sonian's Social Media offering is significantly less expensive then some of the alternatives listed. Some of the competition's pricing, is 10x as expensive as Sonian's offering. Just food for thought...
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Much like the freshly crowned football champions of the world (ESP 1 - 0 NED Final, ET), we here at Sonian are feeling at the top of our game. With the victors presumably now on cloud nine, we at Sonian wish to congratulate Spain and welcome them to the clouds. Over the next four years Spain will come to understand like Sonian has, that operating from the cloud is powerful, beneficial and perhaps unbeatable (stay tuned as Spain looks to defend their throne in Brazil at World Cup 2014). Similarities abound, Spain’s footballing prowess owes itself to the same strengths fueling Sonian’s on-demand, cloud powered hosted data archiving and migration services.
What do the world’s premier football club (Euro Cup Champions ’08, World Cup Champions ‘10) and Sonian have in common you ask?
Security. The Spanish defense allowed just two goals through their World Cup campaign and left their opponent’s score sheet blank (winning 1-0 each time) in their last four games. The Spaniards’ success would never have been realized without staunch team defense. Similarly, ensured data security is the backbone on which Team Sonian’s cloud powered archiving solutions are built. The cloud infrastructure allows for a new kind of data security.
Dependability/Stability. Any archiving/eDiscovery solution must be stable and unfailingly dependable. No matter the circumstances, but especially if litigation looms, archived data must be readily available at any moment’s notice. The cloud infrastructure ensures data will be found and can be presented 24/7. Similar to Sonian, Spain’s on-field product proved to be rigidly stable and unwaveringly dependable. This became clear as Spain slickly dismissed perennial heavyweights Portugal, Germany, and Netherlands from South Africa.
Speed/Accuracy. Spain’s suave style and speed proved to be too much for the field. Ball possession with pinpoint passing and speed off the ball were Spain’s strengths and allowed the team to wear down their opponents, meaning just one strike in the net was enough for victory. Likewise, any exceptional archiving and eDiscovery solution’s (such as Sonian's!) strengths should lie in speed and accuracy.
Architecturally, each of these attributes is essential in becoming “Campeones,” (for English-speaking monolinguals, that’s champions) of both the fútbol world and cloud computing community. Sonian in Needham, MA and the Spanish National Team across the pond both execute and deliver a complete product which incorporates each of these requirements to success.
For Sonian and Spain the future is bright. The Spanish are primed to conquer Euro Cup ’12 and will be favored to take World Cup ’14. In the time before the world’s eyes assemble upon Brazil, as David Linthicum advises in his cloud computing blog, the computing community will further evolve and more users will adopt cloud computing. PC’s were "too freaky" for some in the 1980s, and cloud computing faces similar doubters this decade. Cloud computing today faces the challenge of convincing the world of its wonders.
As some say, history repeats itself. If that is the case, then the future couldn’t be any brighter for Sonian and cloud computing... as well as Spain and cloud nine.
And now that the Vuvuzelas have subsided (for now), I'll say once more, Congratulations to Spain on their World Cup victory!
The Radicati Email Archiving Market Report covers the scope of 2009 to 2013 and shared some interesting facts. The email archiving market contained industries and firms that provided ediscovery, data management, and data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. Here are some of the numbers that were generated by this report.
- The average corporate email user sends and receives 167 messages a day. By 2013 this number will increase to 219 messages. In storage terms that means that the average data usage will increase from 20MB to 31MB by 2013.
- 75% of archiving services today are on premise solutions. Yet the rate of deployment for hosted solutions are increasing faster than on premise solutions, the affordability and simplicity of use appeals to businesses in this slow economy.
- The email archiving market will increase by roughly 25% each year and the majority of this growth will be from deployment of new email archiving products and services, as opposed to upgrading existing systems.
- The email archiving market in 2009 was around $2 billion. By 2013 it is estimated to reach $5.1 billion.
Head over to GWCheck to read the executive summary and the get a peak at the table of contents to see what else this report has to offer.
Register for the July 22nd webinar to see how cloud powered archiving is changing the email archiving market.
Is there a Social Media Maniac in your office?
What is a Social Media Maniac you may ask? Well to me a Social Media Maniac is someone who overindulges themself, and everyone around them, in multiple worlds of social media: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, - to the point where they could be putting their company and their careers at risk. How exactly does this endanger your business? Let's face it, we are ALL Social Media Maniacs in this day and age. I, @BoCramer, sit in a cubicle outside of Greg Arnette's office. I wrote this article and sent it to coworker @AlecKPhillips to proofread, but he was busy asking questions on LinkedIn. I asked Jeff Richards, Sonian's VP of Business Development, but he was walking to George Nichols' office to discuss something above my paygrade. So I grabbed Sam from sales and he was able to help me out.
In the blog Socialnomics, it is stated that Generation Y is about to outgrow the baby boomers…and 96% of them have joined a social media network. I've also read that many teachers and professors say they are able to successfully reach students much more efficiently through social media than through email. If THAT many people are using social media, then THAT many people are also exchanging vital information that may need to be used as evidence in an investigation... welcome to the social media discovery nightmare.
A recent survey by the Deloitte Forensic Center revealed that roughly 2/3's of businesses worry about the e-discovery risks of social media, as they should. However, 25% of them say they are not prepared, and the other 30-35% only think they are partially prepared. Even worse, the decision makers, the C-level executives, are not committing resources to an e-discovery solution. If these businesses need to present this information, and are unable to do so within the given time frame, they will be facing e-discovery settlements and charges similar to what Morgan Stanley experienced in 2006.
This is not an altogether unreasonable request either, in fact many cases have involved information gathering from social media. A major challenge obstructing efficient and functioning social media e-discovery, is the collaboration between legal, IT, and HR departments. Whether there is a lack of communication, or each department doesn't use systems that promote cooperation. In the case of Pension Committee of the University of Montreal Pension Plan vs. Bank of America Securities, the judge took action against the plaintiffs for deleting emails after an e-discovery request was made. Ultimately, the only source of e-discovery was individual employees mining their mailboxes for relevant information. In addition, the court sanctioned plaintiffs for presenting witnesses who were not educated enough in the company's e-discovery processes.
Scared? Probably not. A little unnerved? Sure, me too. Luckily Sonian has rolled out its newest feature: IM and Social Media Archiving. All you Social Media Maniacs (and IT admins of Social Media Maniacs) can stop sweating now, you don't need to give up your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Tweet away.
Learn how to implement this important new technology to safeguard your business.
As cloud powered email archiving providers, we at Sonian know the benefits of running on virtualized servers and operating out of the cloud. However, not everyone understands how beneficial using these resources can be in the IT field. Recently, while surfing the web, I came along a great blog post from ComputerWorld by Chris Poelker. The article is titled "The Data Migration Dilemma" and it gives a great perspective on data migration and upgrading to virtualized servers.
I enjoyed this article from the get go because Chris used a great comparison of his hunt for a new camcorder to a IT department's backup. Before he was functioning with a clunky old camcorder, with the outdated tapes that needed the Video8 adapters and VHS players (who has those anymore?). I remember the chaos of trying to watch a home video on the family camcorder using those same tapes. Nightmares. It would take 30 minutes to find the tape adapter for the VHS, another 20 to rewind it, and then the 30 minutes of poor quality video - not to mention the humiliation of watching ourselves on the TV, but that's besides the point.
Chris pointed out that transferring all his old tapes into digital format, and onto his computer was almost completely painless. With the right equipment and software it was: plug in camera, hit transfer, and off you go. Why is the camcorder anecdote relevant? Well IT backups are often found on tapes and similar technologies to the camcorder tapes exist today for data migration to make the process simple and stress free. In another article on data migration I read called "Data Migration Strategies" by John Shepherd he stated that at any given time 2/3's of the Fortune 1000 are going through some sort of data conversion. That's a lot of data moving most of the time, why not make that process so simple it's a thoughtless process instead of the insanity that is typical data migration?
If IT professionals are trying to migrate data without utilizing storage virtualization the total time it will take, between making sure the new storage units are prepped and arranged same as the previous unit, ensuring the data won't have problems migrating, and the multiple server re-boots, could take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours.
What about with storage virtualization? A few clicks, drag and drops, and MAYBE a necessary installation, you should be done within a few seconds. Chris makes a great case for virtualization while handling data migration, but granted he had me at his camcorder example.
Check out his article in entirety here
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On Tuesday the SEC froze the assets of two Canadian stock scalpers for touting penny stocks on Facebook and Twitter. Two companies under the control of this couple, Carol Mckeown and Daniel Ryan, were also charged for participating in the scheme.
The duo used their Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, emails, and their website "PennyStockChaser" to promote the stocks that they owned so that they could sell them at a higher price during the small window of uptick caused by the increase in activity from the phony "stock tips" coming from the scheming couple. Laura Frieder of Purdue University's Krannert School of Management said that "If a spammer can take a penny stock and turn it into a nickel stock, even for a few hours, he walks away with a significant profit."
The SEC estimates that the couple has realized close to 2.4 million dollars from this scheme. The SEC complaint also includes the failure to disclose these earnings, an attempt by the couple to cover up their profits. The punishments are looking to include injunctions against the two, along with repossession of the money they made during the scheme plus interest and a fine, as well as penny-stock bars against them.
If any lesson can be taken from this incident, it is this: all penny stock crime rings should archive their email and social media communications to meet SEC compliance regulations, and to aid the SEC in their subsequent investigations when you eventually get caught. That, and the fact that the SEC watchdog will be keeping a closer eye on social media. The rapidly increasing presence of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. in today's business ecosystem shows that social media should, and will be treated like any other major form of business communication (phone, email, etc.). The B2B world is adapting, and companies are rolling out new technologies to help other organizations acclimatize to the new business social media environment. Keep an eye out for more social media advances.
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Learn the ins and outs of this important new technology.
Is there any doubt in your mind about how necessary email archiving is for modern organizations? With industry noise about email archiving, and hosted archiving in general, getting louder and louder, it can be difficult to find all the information you need to decide. To help you easily gather information, Sonian compiles relevant content together for you in the Cloud Archiving Monthly Market Update..