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What's in Storage

Don't toss out old emails and files like yesterday's garbage. With easy-to-use archiving sysems, saving has never been simpler or more valuable for your business.
by Lee Gimpel ILLUSTRATION BY TYLER GARRISON - March 2010

Published in :: Technology Business

 

Thanks to digital storage, it’s easy and cheap to save everything you’ve ever created, be it an email, memo or report. But should you?

A 2008 Barracuda Networks study found that nearly 82% of IT professionals viewed email archiving as “important” or “very important.” It’s a safeguard against losing data, and it frees up IT resources to work faster. It also puts files that might have otherwise been deleted at your fingertips. This is especially important if you need to find an old contact, search the emails of a former employee, reuse content or defend yourself in a lawsuit. In addition, compliances like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require institutions to carefully file and disclose company documents and reports.

Stephen Marsh, founder and CEO of the email archiving company Smarsh, says companies that don’t have legal or compliance advisors on staff may be unaware of their archiving responsibilities and liabilities. “It might take them years to figure out that they need to do it,” he says. “And it might be under unfortunate circumstances where they are involved in a legal case or in trouble with a vendor.”

So how do you go about archiving? It depends on the size of your business, the number and types of files (electronic or scanned paper documents) you want to store and how you want to use them.

Mike Lingle, president of Tonic Studios, had 15 years of personal emails saved on various desktop computers that he wanted to access from any computer; he also wanted back-up insurance and the ability to search the content. The solution was to transfer his 150,000 emails to a Google Apps Premier account ($50/year).

To archive and search files belonging to multiple people, small and mid-sized companies can use remote models like Smarsh, which is inexpensive (as low as $100/month for 10 users) and can lessen administrative burdens that come with archiving things in-house. Smarsh software copies files to a remote storage location, where they are searchable through a web-based interface. There are also special compliance options; some standards require that data stored electronically is unalterable so a company can’t later change the documents.

As an alternative to remotely hosted archiving, the Barracuda Message Archiver is a hardware appliance solution that keeps everything on-premises and appeals to companies already using on-site email servers. Steve Pao, vice president of product management, says that the solution is popular with companies that recognize that archiving leads to a more efficient network. One of Barracuda’s products includes 250GB of storage (good for about 75 users) and costs $1,999.

The next time you’re tempted to delete old emails or get rid of files, think again. Saving them can help in the long run.

Published in :: Technology Business

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