Hybrid archiving

Hybrid security is growing in popularity as companies large and small recognize the benefit of using cloud-based malware and spam management as a great way to protect their investment in on-premise systems and manage the bad stuff more effectively. But LiveOffice and Mimosa Systems just announced a hybrid archiving capability (still in beta) that uses both on-premise and cloud-based archiving in a coordinated way.

As noted by both companies, two of the use cases for hybrid archiving are a) the ability to migrate older content from an on-premise archive to the cloud, thereby helping organizations to more effectively and less expensively manage their on-premise archival storage; and b) moving blocks of data to a cloud-based archive for review, such as by external legal counsel during e-discovery or pre-litigation review.

I can also see the benefit of using a hybrid archiving approach for large organizations that maintain a number of satellite offices, where the headquarters location might want to have on-premise archiving, but use cloud-based archiving for their smaller offices that do not have dedicated IT staff. Other scenarios might include the ability to migrate more easily to on-premise archiving as a company grows, migrating to the cloud if there are cutbacks in an IT department, or simply taking advantage of the lowest possible costs for storage.