Although I still like the “pass through” methodology employed by the Postini (Google) email filtering Software as a Service solution, I’ve been concerned at the lack of a fully integrated archiving service. Integrated in the sense that it is more easily accessible from a user perspective as there are two primary reasons for archiving:
- long term archive for audit, regulatory and legal reasons
- an effective way to reduce the proliferation and growth of Outlook’s (and similar) data files (.pst)
The first is relatively straightforward in that an email, passing through the email service, simply gets pulled aside and stored. It’s easy to do this in-the-cloud but it’s the user access to this that becomes an issue. Emails are generally accessed directly from Outlook be that in the Inbox or via a sub-folder within the Outlook sub-file structure. Archiving these documents and deleting them from the Outlook system makes them harder to find as a separate web portal is often required to access them.
If Outlook itself uses a file structure that exists in-the-cloud, then all email searches and history will be available as if on-line but actually stored off-site. This means that the decision to archive or not is no longer a big deal. That means less growth of local repositories of emails and an answer to many an organisation’s problems dealing with email storage.
Having been looking at the market for a while, the best solution that I’ve found that ticks all the boxes comes from Mimecast. They have made the archive available directly from Outlook and the interface remains consistent regardless of whether you are searching local or remotely held storage.
I’m pleased to report that Vioptim has signed up as a Mimecast partner and is looking forward to introducing this technology to our customers and prospects. For further information please view here.
