Did You Hear the One About the Email Outage? Yeah, Me Neither …
Email outages can be devastating ...
“Twenty six percent of organizations experience more than 30 minutes of unplanned downtime each month – in fact, 12 percent of organizations experience two or more hours of unplanned downtime each month.” - Osterman Research (December 2010)
When it comes to email, unplanned downtime is no laughing matter, which is why we are excited to announce the availability of our new LiveOffice Email Continuity solution today. We’ve been in the email continuity/backup business since 2008, but today is a milestone.
Our upgraded service is the first to integrate with cloud-based security solutions, so our clients can keep their existing spam-and-virus protection in place, while taking advantage of always-on email continuity (whether their email is hosted on-premise or in the cloud). This means that messages are protected from zero-day attacks, data loss and intellectual property (IP) leakage, even when your primary mail system is unavailable.
You can read the full announcement here.
We know our solution isn’t the only continuity product out there today, but there are some key differentiators between our offering and some of the others:
- End users can continue sending and receiving messages via Outlook – they don’t have to use another email service to access their messages during the outage.
- IT doesn’t have to worry about installing any on-premise components for synchronization between the continuity service and their on-premise mail server (e.g., Exchange) – keep in mind that some cloud-based continuity solutions still require the admin to install something on a server-class machine.
- Full integration with Exchange 2010 – we are one of the only continuity solutions on the market today that can make the move with you if you plan to migrate to Exchange 2010 (we can even help provide continuous email access to your end users during the migration).
- Users can still access messages on their mobile devices during the outage/downtime – our solution provides native support for mobile devices, so mobile warriors don’t have to access their messages via a separate web portal.
In addition, our service means that IT can focus on getting their server back online vs. coming up with a temporary fix for end users.
The Cloud Bursts Open at Dreamforce
The cloud is alive, well and thriving at this year’s 8th annual Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference, the leading cloud event of the year. Dreamforce is an amazing event, and registrants have swelled to more than 30,000. They are making sure we are well entertained with performances by Stevie Wonder and Will.I.Am as well as an appearance by Bill Clinton.
Don’t let the DJs in every corner of Moscone Center fool you – Dreamforce is for all of us cloud disciples. In his two keynotes, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff discussed the growth of his company, the consumerization of IT, the growth of smartphones and social media, while sharing his vision for Salesforce and its six clouds:
- Sales Cloud: Gives reps, managers and execs everything they need to focus on what’s important: more selling and less administration. Benioff spoke to Salesforce’s market leadership, customer success and product innovation, including Dell’s new Boomi acquisition and new Sales Cloud features in Winter 2011, including improvements to Outlook Integration, quotes, reporting and dashboards.
- Service Cloud: Provides faster, more responsive service across every channel—from the call center to the social Web. Benioff announced 36 percent improvements reported by customers, using the Service Cloud.
- Force.com Platform: Allows developers to develop native Salesforce business applications, using its open cloud platform (now boasts 185,000 apps). Benioff also announced the acquisition of Heroku, which lets developers create Ruby-based Cloud2 apps.
- Jigsaw – Data Cloud: Makes searching for leads and dirty data a thing of the past with access to more than 23 million crowd-sourced business contacts, which are continuously refreshed by more than 1.2 million community members.
- Chatter – Collaboration Cloud: Lets groups work more efficiently and closely with colleagues, using Chatter’s own private and secure social network. The new suite of Chatter products includes Chatter Free, Chatter Mobile and Chatter Plus. Benioff also made a number of Chatter-related announcements, including the launch of Chatter.com, Groups (lets you create a public or private group for anything like competitors, customer references, engineering collaborations, etc.) and Dashboards (in a few weeks) will be able to feed to Chatter.
- Database.com (new): Provides an enterprise-class database with the power of cloud computing, including relational data, full text search, user management, row-level security, triggers and stored procedures, authentication and APIs.
The energy level at Marc Benioff’s keynotes (and even within the exhibition hall) has been electric.
The response we received with our Chatter Archive announcement has been incredible—both from a booth traffic standpoint as well as groundswell interest from Salesforce.com account executives looking to deploy Chatter to enterprise clients (many of which are in heavily regulated industries). What we keep hearing is:
- Chatter has the potential to transform enterprise online collaboration.
- Chatter is pretty scary from a compliance and governance perspective. Many organizations are, in fact, hesitant to deploy Chatter without having some checks and balances built-in from a process perspective.
If you’re in the vicinity, come by and see us at booth #1205 or learn more here.
Top 10 Predictions for Email Archiving in 2011
“Forecasting is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.”
We’ve been in the archiving game for a long time and seen all kinds of changes in our industry as the technology has evolved and the use cases for archiving have expanded beyond regulatory compliance. This experience, combined with our connversations with key analysts, strategic partners, and our own clients, has equipped us with a unique perspective to project where current trends are heading.
We think that the most intriguing changes will occur in the areas of end-user and mobile access to archives, growth of cloud messaging and archiving and expanded archiving functionality into the realms of e-discovery, social media and continuity services. With hands firmly clasped on our dowsing rods, here’s our top 10 email archiving predictions for 2011:
1. Demand from end users to access their email archive as an Unlimited Mailbox: Email archiving is quickly becoming a valuable tool for enhancing end user productivity. With users spending an average of 15-30 minutes a day managing their inbox (in an effort to stay within tightly regulated mailbox quotas), precious time is being wasted that could be re-focused on revenue-enhancing activities. Many of these users are asking for direct access to their archived messages, without IT intervention. Therefore, archiving solutions that empower end users to restore lost emails themselves—even things they may have deleted from their desktop, laptop, BlackBerry® or Windows Phone 7 device—are in high demand. In addition, this trend makes archiving vendors that are able to provide unlimited storage and retention for a flat, monthly price per user an attractive option for IT departments operating on tight budgets.
2. Stub-free approaches to mailbox management: Historically, stubbing - an archiving feature that strips an email of its attachments, replaces it with a stub file or link within the message, and then stores the actual attachment in an archive – has been a popular way to manage email storage. However over time, this practice has created bigger challenges for organizations including slower Microsoft Exchange Server performance, increased administrative overhead, added management complexity and limited migration options. In the coming year, many expect to see increased adoption of stub-free approaches to mailbox management – known as Mailbox Management 2.0 – to help them overcome these known shortcomings.
3. Merging of email archiving and continuity: Today, most organizations have no tolerance for email downtime – whether planned or unplanned. With increased demand for always-on email, many companies are looking for a combined archiving and continuity solution. In 2011, an increasing number of organizations will look to deploy archiving technology that also provides them with continuity capabilities so that users can continue to send and receive messages when their primary mail server is down.
4. Growth of cloud-based email platforms: The growth of cloud-based email platforms, like Office365 (formerly BPOS) and Google’s Gmail, is undeniable. However, this trend has serious implications for archiving vendors since not all of them can integrate with both on-premise and cloud-based platforms. In the coming year, many organizations will re-evaluate their archiving strategy to ensure that it aligns with the current and future plans for their messaging environment as a whole.
5. Continued migration to cloud-based archiving solutions: According to some analyst estimates, the market for cloud-based archiving solutions is expected to deliver more than 50% of the total archiving market revenue in just a few years. Factoring in trends such as unlimited storage needs, stub-free storage management, continuity requirements and compatibility with cloud-based email platforms, LiveOffice anticipates that adoption of cloud-based archiving solutions will continue to outpace demand for on-premise offerings.
6. Anytime, anywhere archive access: Current industry research indicates that mobility is a top priority for many organizations. For example, the Nielsen Company recently reported that 28 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones. In addition, ESG reports that nearly a third of companies surveyed indicated that 30 percent of their employees use Outlook Web Access as the primary means for accessing email. As a result, LiveOffice predicts that mobility will also become an important part of the archiving vendor selection process for many companies who want their users to have archive access from their desktop, laptop and mobile device. This trend will also lead more companies to evaluate cloud-based archiving solutions since on-premise archiving software deployments do not permit mobile access for end users.
7. Enhanced legal discovery workflows: Roughly three out of four discovery orders today require email to be produced as part of the discovery process, which means that archiving solutions with fully integrated legal discovery workflows continue to be in high demand. In keeping with this trend, 2011 will see more companies turning to their email archive to help them increase their agility in responding to pending litigation (or even just HR investigations) by enabling them to delegate reviewer-only access, create and manage matters, apply granular and dynamic legal holds, cull data and export search results for early case assessment—saving time and money.
8. Increased scrutiny on security: For companies evaluating cloud-based archiving solutions, the security of proprietary data stored outside their network is a significant concern. In 2011, these organizations will place an even greater emphasis on verifying that their cloud archiving vendor can validate system security in three core areas: Physical Security (security of the vendor’s buildings and collocation facilities), Technical Security (security of the archiving systems, networks and applications) and Administrative Security (the security processes and protocols across all levels of the vendor’s organization).
9. Enhanced focus on social media archiving requirements: The rise of social media usage (via sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook) within the enterprise means that an increasing number of organizations are evaluating how they will preserve business-related social media interactions among employees. In the new year, LiveOffice predicts that companies will focus more closely on implementing social media usage policies and automating enforcement by deploying a cloud-based social media archiving solution.
10. More demand for third party archiving solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: With adoption of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on the rise, many companies are interested in taking advantage of its built-in archiving capabilities. While these features will meet basic archiving needs, organizations with more advanced legal discovery, regulatory compliance and/or storage management needs will still deploy third-party archiving solutions. As a result, in 2011, organizations will look for third-party solutions that can seamlessly integrate with their existing Exchange Server (2003, 2007), while also facilitating a “cleaner” migration to Exchange Server 2010 when the time comes.
As we slowly emerge from the economic doldrums of the past few years, we anticipate that email archiving will remain one of the hottest IT technologies. This bullish prediction is based on the fact that email archiving has the potential to simultaneously serve so many stakeholders. From email administrators coping with storage overload to legal teams struggling with e-discovery requests to HR professionals worried about the company’s intellectual property walking out the front door to end users who wage their daily battle with mailbox quotas.
Today’s email archiving solutions can address these headaches head-on and enable your IT department to focus on revenue-enhancing initiatives by offloading a ton of the administrative burden.
Facebook Messages: A New Content Type to Worry About
Earlier this week, Facebook launched a "modern messaging system," a system that hopes to transcend email, SMS, and other messaging services. "Facebook Mail," as some are now calling it, includes Facebook.com email addresses and will be rolled out slowly over the next few months.
A New Type of Messaging
Even though there's an inbox and an @facebook.com email address, Facebook Message is more tightly integrated with chat and text rather than a standalone email service. That’s why Facebook is framing the service as more of a conversation, than a traditional email client or service.
Zuckerberg outlined three features that will define Facebook's new offering, which Zuckerberg described as "the way the future should work":
- Seamless Messaging: Users can chat with people via SMS, email, or IM
- Conversation History: See everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation
- Social Inbox: Filtering exactly the messages you want to see
When you're writing messages, you can send the message to people on Facebook, and to people not on Facebook. Pretty cool!
You can enter a friend's email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them.
A Business Perspective
There is no doubt that Facebook will be able to leverage its massive 500 million user base to change the way people interact online, but this new mode of messaging also presents challenges to businesses.
These include:
- Privacy: Many consumers are already skittish about privacy matters, and may abandon the service all together if it experiences any significant privacy violations.
- Security: Facebook users need to realize that these new features increase the attack surface on the Facebook platform, and make personal accounts all the more alluring for cyber criminals to break into. Since Facebook accounts will now be linked with many more people in the users' social circles, this opens up new opportunities for identity fraud.
- Compliance: This will naturally open up a new set of issues for companies that are currently mandated to archive their email and will require them to provide some level of supervision.
- Email Use Policy: It will become increasingly imperative to remind users of the corporate policy on the use of public email services at work (especially since these conversations can be categorized as ESI in discoverable in a lawsuit).
As Mark Zuckerberg said during his introduction, “This is not an email killer, this is a messenger system that includes email as part of it.” But companies will still need to prepare for the increased demand of an integrated social medium within its firewall.
The Importance of a Mobile Archive
Any truly usable archive should be an extension of your primary email experience. This means you should be able to access your archive 24–7–365, from your email application or mobile phone, whether you are in the office or on the go.
Remote Access to Email
Web interfaces, such as Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Domino Web Access, are becoming more popular. According to analyst firm ESG, nearly a third of the companies recently surveyed said that OWA is the primary means of accessing email for at least 30 percent of their employees in two years.
Mobile Phone Access to Email
Mobile devices have also changed how employees interact with email. Almost every email user now has (or wants) a BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, iPhone, Droid or other type of phone to stay connected to corporate email at all times.
In fact, the Nielsen Company reported last week that by the third quarter of 2010, 28 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones (i.e., cell phones with operating systems resembling those of computers). The growing popularity of smartphones, like Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices and a variety of Google Android-based models on the market, has accelerated the adoption rate.
According to Nielsen, 41 percent of new cell phone purchasers in the past six months opted for a smartphone over a standard feature phone, up from 35 percent last quarter.
Cloud-Based Email Platforms
More and more enterprises are now considering cloud-based email platforms. Microsoft continues to tout and make a big strategic bet on its Office 365 (formerly BPOS) solution to compete against corporate Gmail. In addition, IBM has enhanced its Domino offering, so it can be consumed as an online service.
Anywhere, Anytime Archive Access
Giving users multiple ways to access their email anytime, anywhere has an impact on your email archive and the ability to let users access it, regardless of their location (and access point). If your archiving solution relies on stubbing (i.e., a stub is just a small file that points to a copy of the original message in the archive), it hinders efforts to give your users 24–7–365 access to their personal archives, because smartphones usually cannot read those messages. (To learn more about email stubbing, visit www.mailboxmanagement.org.)
Older email archiving solutions are quickly being rendered obsolete as newer approaches can facilitate and support web, cloud-email and mobile device access to your archives. The good news is that with these newer (stub-free) approaches your archive is quickly becoming a must-have for the end-user – and not just an IT imperative.
Halloween Email Nightmares
On this Halloween, I’d thought share some of my personal favorite email horror stories.
We’ve all heard of (or perhaps been unwitting accomplices) in some cringe-worthy email snafus on the job. This often range from disclosing an employee’s salary details to the entire company to making insulting comments about the boss - who got accidentally copied on the email (that one especially hurts).
Whether sending a hasty email to the “wrong Susie," accidentally replying to the entire department when you meant to send a heads-up to a co-worker, attaching the wrong document to a message, or perhaps mistakenly forwarding a message that contains past messages you’d rather the recipient hadn’t seen, most of the time an email gaffe ends up a non-issue or blows over pretty quietly. After all, to err is human.
But sometimes, they can have some pretty scary and unintended consequences. Consider these gems:
The Haunting Irony of Eliot Spitzer: Back in 2005, Eliot Spitzer, (then) Attorney General, New York State prophetically: “Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail.” Those words came back tohaunt him in 2008 when Spitzer was linked to a high-end prostitution ring (having spent tens of thousands on call girls) and subsequently had to announce his resignation. The great irony here: Spitzer was caught in the FBI’s dragnet thanks to some taped phone calls and a few unseemly text messages.
Eerily Stupid: Style Weekly reporter gets fired for an email about a 'blind f@*!': A reporter at Style Weekly thought he was sending an email to his editor on Wednesday, in which he called a blind motivational speaker a "blind [expletive]." However, it turns out the reporter sent the note to the blind man's PR person.
UC San Diego Accidentally Sends Acceptance Email to All Applicants: In March 2009, over 46,000 students received welcoming emails of admission to UC San Diego. Unfortunately, only 18,000 of the students actually got in. The school’s admissions office mistakenly sent the email message to the entire freshman applicant pool, giving false hope to over 28,000 students for a few hours, at which point a corrective and apologetic email message was sent out.
Aussie banker prefers no Halloween Costumes: A banker at Macquarie Private Wealth in Sydney became an internet sensation after he was caught on live television viewing images of a scantily clad supermodel. He opened some “not-so-work-appropriate” photos of a model, unaware a colleague behind him was doing a live television interview about the Australian economy.
Email mistakes can be painfully visible and viral, so you must be especially careful in this economy not to do anything that could cause employers to question your competence or judgment, and that means paying close attention when sending any kind of message, particularly if the information is sensitive.
With today’s long lifespan of electronic recordkeeping and email monitoring on the rise, some issues may be better expressed in person. I'm think I just heard an "Amen" from Mr. Spitzer.
Happy Halloween and Safe Emailing!
Say “no” to stubbing: Introducing Mailbox Management 2.0
The topic of email stubbing is admittedly a little arcane, but actually it can actually have a big impact on your email performance and a number of other areas that impact both your end-users and your IT workload.
What is stubbing?
Stubbing is just an archiving mechanism that strips an email of its attachments, replaces it with a stub file or link within the message, and then stores the actual attachment in an archive. This can make pay some immediate dividends in terms of email storage.
Companies that implemented on-premise archiving solutions which leveraged stubbing over the last ten years saw their initial mailbox sizes and backup windows shrink. But, the same customers discovered over time that stubbing also created new, bigger challenges. This is why we refer to the era of stubbing as Mailbox Management 1.0.
Here are some of the very real challenges caused by stubbing:
Promise: Stubbing is easy for IT to deploy.
Reality: Stubbing customers learned Microsoft Outlook plug-ins are difficult to deploy and support.
Promise: Stubbing improves Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook performance.
Reality: Item count is what drives Exchange performance, not mailbox size.
Promise: Stubbing allows access from anywhere.
Reality: Stubbing customers learned stubs don’t work on mobile devices or with Outlook Web Access.
Promise: Stubbing enhances the end-user search experience.
Reality: End-users discovered that they couldn't use native Microsoft Outlook functionality to search across attachments and that archive searches became slower over time.
Promise: Stubbing is easier for end-users.
Reality: Stubbing customers learned their end-users ended up with two email repositories to search.
Whether or not to stub emails should be a part of the discussion when planning for email storage, simply because storage–especially for a large enterprise–can be a problem. That’s why we’ve developed a new model, one without stubs, that we call Mailbox Management 2.0.
Intrigued?
Check out our new Mailbox Management 2.0 microsite which includes a compelling video from Brian Babineau, Senior Analyst at ESG who discusses the challenges of stubbing as well as new approaches to mailbox management.
Sony Walkman: The End of an Era
While reports about the demise of the Sony Walkman may be premature, Sony plans to halt production of the 30-year-old portable music player in Japan (but will still make it available in the U.S.). But, the end of the era is clearly drawing near.
A similar trend may be underway in the world of tape-based backups. The purpose of backups is to restore a system to a current state (as of the date of the most recent backup) in case of system failure--or to restore lost or deleted files. Backup media is not intended to serve as long-term storage and consequently is often retained for only a few days or weeks (as newer backup copies supersede previous versions).
Online backups are quickly gaining popularity for a variety of reasons. Online backup solutions are typically built around a client software program that runs on a schedule, usually once a day and at night, while computers aren’t in use. These programs collect, compress, encrypt and transfer the data to the service provider's servers or off-site hardware. This helps offload one of the more tedious and complex IT jobs.
But, even with the surge in online backups, it’s important to understand the difference between a backup and an online archive. A backup is designed as a short-term insurance policy to facilitate disaster recovery, while an archive is designed to provide ongoing rapid access to decades of business information. Archived records can be placed outside the traditional backup cycle for a long period of time and is indexed in real time for searchability, while backup operations protect active data that's changing on a frequent basis.
Whether you stick with tape or move to online backups, remember it’s still important to think about the long-term retention, compliance and potential legal discovery issues that only an email archive can effectively address.
Government Agencies Help Cloud Computing Industry to Mature
Microsoft has been busy this month in what some have called a race with Google. First, it teams up with Facebook to enhance Bing’s search, releases its Window 7 phone and announces Office 365. Then, just when you thought the wave was over, Microsoft closes* two huge cloud service deals with the city of New York and the state of California.
According to reports, accessing all of Microsoft’s business productivity tools via the cloud will save New York City an estimated $50 million over the next five years. The state of California will be spending $50 million in a three year contract with Microsoft to access cloud-based business tools and migrate all employee email to the cloud.
Cloud computing isn’t just being implemented at the city and state level. The U.S. Federal Government, through the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced that “federal, state, local, and tribal governments will soon have access to cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings through the government’s cloud-based services storefront, Apps.gov.”
The emerging trend here is that government agencies are helping to push the cloud computing industry toward maturity and broader mainstream adoption. These agencies are serving as early adopters – easing the fears around security, cost and implementation. In addition, it will spark healthy competition in the cloud computing market that will lead to more product innovation; expect to see budding vendors in the space sure to set off more chatter.
*According to this TechCrunch article, New York City renegotiated and consolidated its existing contracts with Microsoft which prevented the project from going out to bid.
New Email Archiving Trend Report Says Cloud is the Future
Even through the recession, the email archiving market continues to grow rapidly. Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: E-Mail Archiving Strong Growth Continues,” forecasts the industry will grow 23 percent per year, reaching $2.2 billion by 2014. The report, published on October 6, 2010 by Alan Dayley and Sheila Childs, evaluated on-premise and cloud email archiving providers in terms of revenue and market share from 2008 to 2009.
The email archiving industry is steadily growing and the report indicates that cloud archiving is its driving force. Gartner analysts determined that “by 2014, more than 50 percent of revenue generated in this market will be from cloud-based solutions.” As a pure cloud email archiving provider, LiveOffice has been ahead of trend for 10 years. This will be the second consecutive year LiveOffice is listed as the market share leader and highest revenue earner for cloud archiving.
Why is cloud archiving leading the way? It removes the complexity of archiving implementations and ongoing management. A robust cloud archiving suite helps enterprises avoid pain points like expensive and unpredictable hardware purchases; lengthy and complex installation processes; time-consuming and error-prone upgrades and maintenance procedures; and restrictive retention limits or escalating storage costs.
As enterprises see the simplicity and scalability of cloud email archiving, they are migrating to the SaaS model. On-premise solutions are indicators of this trend as they recently began to offer basic cloud archiving services. To see the source report, click here.