Hosted archiving has a number of obvious attractions, such as:
- Fast installation.
- Probably lower TCO.
- Less use of internal IT staff.
Here are some thoughts about requirements for enterprise hosted archiving:
- Customer-premises-based encryption/decryption is required, to provide for privacy.
- Customer premises appliance or server is required to provide for encryption and Active Directory integration.
- Modern distributed search capabilities (think Google architecture, but queries themselves can be far more elaborate than those of Google).
- Tight integration with Active Directory, so policy and searches can be based on user groups, and so users have single sign-on.
BTW, in this regard, we like what we hear about Fortiva’s hosted archiving.
One Comment
Other things to consider around hosted archiving …
1. Which country the data is stored is important for certain compliance regimes.
2. Speed of connection to the datacenter becomes a major factor in some scenarios – not so important for archival (i.e., Iron Mountain model), but very important if clients have ability to search/retrieve data (which they are accustomed to in any on-premises storage archiving scenarios today).
3. Google v Microsoft will be interesting to watch. Google recently dropped pricing on Postini archiving.
4. Trust continues to be a big factor, with enterprises wanting to have a safe harbor copy of their data on-premises in many cases.
5. Typical cloud services scenarios come with a relatively low switching cost i.e., if customer is unhappy with service from hoster#1 they can choose to switch to hoster#2 on short notice. Hosted archiving can increase switching costs.
6. Different hosting approaches need to be looked at differently — dedicated hosting is relatively mundane … cost savings increases (as does complexity e.g., with respect to things like AD integration that you mention) in multi-tenancy scnearios.
David