Should You Avoid Hosted Archiving?

The decision of whether or not to archive email and other electronic content is (or at least should be) fairly simple: if you keep a copy of your personal tax return for at least a few years, then you’ve already acknowledged the importance of archiving critical information. Just apply the same logic to your business records.

More problematic for some decision makers, however, is the notion of using a hosted or SaaS-based archiving solution. For some decision makers, letting a third party manage the crown jewels – the critical business records that they will need for many years – is not as desirable as on-premise solutions because they fear the loss of those records, an inability to retrieve them on demand, poor performance when conducting searches, and so forth. While this perception is real, the evidence to support it simply is not there. Consider:

• Global Relay, which focuses heavily on the financial services industry – the most rigorous industry for archiving given SEC and FINRA requirements for long-term data retention with very high integrity – has been in the hosted archiving business for 11 years and in that time has never experienced even one incident in which it lost a customer’s email. The company’s infrastructure is highly scalable and is based on a very high performance search database technology that permits rapid searching across even enormous stores of archived data, with a typical search conducted in under three seconds (we recently published a white paper with survey results that were somewhat contrary to this, but the white paper presented the results of a survey, not a bakeoff). Global Relay’s customer data is encrypted using a highly secure encryption algorithm.
• Smarsh is another hosted provider that has been in the archiving business for many years and also focuses on the financial services industry. Yes, Smarsh had an outage of its Web site and VoIP-based phone system back in February (prompting one blogger to question the integrity of the company’s archived data), but absolutely no customer data was lost, nor was the archiving of customer data interrupted in any way.
• LiveOffice is another leading vendor of hosted archiving that has been in business since 1998 with a heavy emphasis on the financial services industry. The company serves a large and growing client base, offers 99.99% uptime (less than 4.5 minutes per month) and a 97% client retention rate, all while offering very good performance and tremendous security.
• Proofpoint, which acquired hosted archiving vendor Fortiva in 2008, uses its DoubleBlind Encryption technology to encrypt clients’ data both in transit and while being stored at Proofpoint’s data centers. Proofpoint’s archiving offering is focused on Exchange-enabled organizations and offers another highly secure and safe choice for archiving data.

There are many other good hosted archiving vendors that are worth a close look if you need to archive your data – and you should. Hosted archiving is safe and your data will be secure – ‘nuff said.

However, another important consideration for the use of hosted archiving solutions is the ability to store and retrieve data over the long term. For example, when I worked at SRI International, one operation in the company was going through an audit in which it needed to retrieve data from tapes that were about a decade old. The company was having difficulty reading this data because the equipment that had recorded it was no longer in use – retrieving the data was going to cost a bundle. That’s a problem that could occur for companies that manage their own data for long periods assuming that they migrate their older data to tape instead of keeping it on magnetic storage, which many do for cost reasons. Because tapes deteriorate over time, many companies find that they simply cannot retrieve very old data – assuming they still have the equipment that can read those tapes.

Even for data that is stored for much shorter periods, on-premise archival can be compromised by natural disasters, power outages, fires, floods and other problems. This won’t happen to most companies, but it will happen to enough of them to warrant taking precautions against these eventualities.

These arguments don’t mean that organizations should not use on-premise archiving – there are many very good on-premise solutions available and organizations of all sizes can be well served with an on-premise solution. But the bottom line is this: hosted archiving is safe and, with the right vendor, your data will be secure.