New regulations will burden IT on compliance

2009 and beyond will bring increased oversight on business communications and the IT department will have to meet these new challenges to archive and make available all electronic correspondence in a timely manner.

This is the role of an enterprise archiving system, designed to store the huge volume of information generated in the email systems each year. IT decision makers should look at the new generation of hosted archiving services, especially cloud-powered SaaS services that solve the archiving problem more securely and cost effectively than legacy hosted infrastructures.

Lessons Learned: Processing millions of messages in the cloud

Our cloud-compute powered hosted email archiving service is truly a marvel of efficiency and reliability. The system process millions of messages, and we have learned a great deal over the last eighteen months about scalability, parallel computing, and helping our customers do more with less IT budget dollars. The processing engine (see right*) indexes, encrypts and stores across an infinite pool of on-demand CPU resources. *(We jest about the mechanical engine, but if it were 1900 this is what our system would look like :) )

Cloud computing is also ushering in a new era of transparency and accountability between IT vendors and customers. The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because snafus in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises business solutions. When a cloud compute service has a problem, everyone knows. And let's face facts: no IT (cloud or on-premise) solution is immune to problems, but cloud systems by their very nature recover more quickly and are built with true 24x7x365 design goals. Cloud-powered SaaS is the equivalent of a 24 hour news cable channel with millions of daily viewers. The iconic TV test pattern can't display for very long without losing the audience.

We look forward to the competition from on-premise vendors and their reliability claims compared to cloud-powered SaaS. As a point of reference, according to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email-related solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month. Hosted services provide much better up time, on average, than software/appliance based solutions.

AWSome! - We're a finalist in the AWS Startup Challenge

Sonian's cloud compute powered archiving service, running on the AWS infrastructure, is a finalist in the 2008 Startup Challenge.

We're looking forward to some spirited business competition with the other finalist, and congratulate all the other companies that made the cut.

Enterprise 2 Cloud - Migrate your legacy archive to Sonian cloud solution

The need for archiving and eDiscovery has been around for over ten years and many forward thinking companies recognized the benefits of implementing email archiving years ago. These trailblazing companies who purchased installed email archiving solutions are unfortunately paying for this decision.

Most companies that implemented an email archiving system over the past ten (10) years had limited options available; install on-premises software solution. Installed software requires the implementation and management of additional hardware, databases, storage and third-party software before a company can recognize the benefit of the solution.

While the email archiving installation worked fairly well during the first couple years, these companies are now faced with great pain in keeping this internal resource on with this internal resource. "When these implementations took place, the hardware and storage requirements were typically designed for 3-5 years of growth. However, these specifications were based on faulty assumptions and did not properly account for email growth after the date of implementation. The trends for email usage has skyrocketed in recent years and now includes more rich text-based email with large file attachments and media files.

Sonian is here to help you move your current installed software to a cloud-based solution.

Visualize your search and e-discovery experience

"Time is money" - the age-old axiom is now relevant more than ever. More data to analyze, less time for the task, and now less budget money for IT.

Our product designers at Sonian Labs are working on some exciting new visualization techniques to help our hosted email archive audience search their unstructured data more efficiently.

The traditional e-discovery experience is to view a linear listing of documents that must be viewed one-by-one to determine relevance to the search request. Sonian is working on newer ways to evaluate the contents of the data set earlier in the process that allow reviewers to focus on the documents that are most important to the case and to eliminate those that have no relevance. Visualization techniques, lightning fast search, and a "time-machine" view of the data set will be a powerful combination of tools at your finger tips (and in your web browser.)

This not only helps with formulating a successful case strategy, but it can save a tremendous amount of time and money with e-discovery processing and review.

Should your email archive be in the cloud?

Microsoft has put their muscle into the "cloud." Azure, while still more concept than reality, shows corporate IT the cloud is a viable place to host some or all of a companies' infrastructure.

Email and collaboration, by the nature of how they need to be available 24x7 and place demanding burden on already over-worked IT staff, are perfect problem for cloud based solutions. A hybrid approach is to keep the core server on premise and host the ancillary services likes anti-spam/virus and archiving. Companies gain the benefit of cloud computing, and as the experience of using cloud services gets better, more IT functions can be moved into the cloud over time. But start with archiving today.

For many organizations a hosted email archive option is not only a viable choice, it's the best choice. Businesses get the benefits of not having to maintain their own infrastructure, and since SaaS vendors can update all customers at once, new features and capabilities are updated on a regular basis, without the need to go through costly software upgrades.

IT budgets will propel cloud-compute based solutions

At certain times in the evolution of IT trends, there is a tipping point which dramatically accelerates the future. In recent memory Netscape did this for the Internet, and more historically Microsoft did this for the whole era of personal computing. In the last three years Amazon Web Services accelerate cloud-scale adoptions. Tipping point companies or technologies, which move the industry forward in great leaps, will help organizations do more for less IT budget dollars.

Today's troubling financial situation will be the tipping point that drives adoption of cloud compute based services. CFOs will be looking to save money, and the cloud's model of transparency, pay as you go, and pay for what you consume, is a refreshing change away from expensive monolithic closed proprietary software solutions.

Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. The payoffs could be noticeable during the current economic downturn.

Sonian is your partner in this seismic shift. We bring the world's first cloud compute based hosted email archive service to market. We are here to help solve your archiving needs with our unique service.