FEATURE EDITORIAL

Email Archiving Market Red Hot

A flurry of announcements in the archiving space has been made of late. Three vendors in as many weeks have come out with significantly lower email archiving and e-Discovery price models.

Fortiva

On January 28, Fortiva, a provider of on-demand email archiving, announced the availability of the Fortiva SmartStore archive. The company describes the service as a cost-effective way for businesses to meet the demands of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), without adding to their existing infrastructure or IT staffing requirements. The release says the Software as a Service (SaaS) solution allows businesses to centrally archive all email, enforce policies and litigation holds, perform enterprise search and easily conduct early case assessment, all for the same or less than the cost of storing and managing the data on enterprise storage in-house. Fortiva's SmartStore archive for a 1000-user company including storage and licensing fees starts at US$1.10 per user, per month. Fortiva notes that pricing will vary according to the amount of storage required.

Google

Last week Tuesday, Google announced a series of security products "Powered by Postini" that deliver message filtering, encryption and archiving for any business environment. Google's new security services work with any mail system, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell Groupwise. Google is offering Google Message Filtering at US$3 per user per year, Google Message Security at US$12 per user per year and Google Message Discovery at US$25 per user per year for one year of archived data -- additional years of data retention are available separately. The new packages are part of the Google Apps platform and are available direct from Google and through its channel partners.

MessageOne

Yesterday, MessageOne, a provider of on-demand email management solutions, announced EMS Rapid Archive, its new email archiving service. According to the company, MessageOne's new SaaS archive will enable companies to manage message retention and deletion, implement litigation holds and dramatically reduce the cost of e-Discovery through real-time message search and review. Priced at just US$1 per user per month for 500 users (including message storage) MessageOne rightly notes that pricing like this can tip the total cost of ownership scales in favor of SaaS over on-premise alternatives.

Commenting on the Google announcement, but applicable to all, Gartner analysts anticipate that "This pricing will force other vendors to meet a new pricing floor."

But that is not all the news from MessageOne this week. On Tuesday came the announcement that Dell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MessageOne. The board of directors of each company approved the acquisition, for approximately US$155 million in cash. "This is a valuable acquisition for Dell. MessageOne's offerings add key capabilities to our growing SaaS-enabled services portfolio for the most critical application to businesses of any size - e-mail," said Steve Schuckenbrock, president, Dell Global Services, and chief information officer. The acquisition is made all the more interesting because MessageOne was co-founded by Adam Dell, Michael Dell's brother.

Mimosa

In other archiving news, Mimosa Systems, a provider of live content archiving solutions, last week announced the Mimosa NearPoint Content Monitoring Option. Because archiving serves as the corporate memory for companies, it follows that that memory should be well managed and monitored. Mimosa reports that many companies are regularly subjected to litigation and discovery based on preventable actions by employees. "Questionable content in employee email communications has been and always will be a major risk for companies of all sizes," said Patrick Cooper, IT network administrator at the law firm of Ryley, Carlock & Applewhite. "The Mimosa NearPoint solution enables corporate legal and HR departments to proactively monitor their corporate email communications to ensure adherence to their email user and retention policies to mitigate litigation risk."

Mimosa NearPoint's Content Monitoring Policy engine allows for the creation of very specific requirements for messages to be compared against for resolution. These policies can be directed at all mailboxes, geographies, departments, workgroups, specific mailboxes or even specific messages. They can also be applied to any type of mailbox data, including calendar entries, contacts, tasks, and notes.

Endpoint Security for OWA 2007

According to a recent survey of 1,000 IT Managers by ScanSafe, over 50 percent of remote employees are not adhering to corporate security policies when it comes to Web usage. We are reminded by the folks at Messageware, a provider of enterprise productivity and security solutions for Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA), that for the millions of companies worldwide, which rely on OWA and are considering a complex and costly upgrade to Exchange 2007, a top consideration should be securing OWA email accounts without relying only on user education. Forms-based authentication (FBA), the login security feature in Exchange 2007, relies on the user to correctly select whether their computer is Private or Public when logging in to OWA. However, according to Messageware, users often select the Private login option because it allows them longer periods of session inactivity before being logged off. In addition, when users navigate away from their OWA session to another Web page, any other user can get back into their active OWA session without being required to provide a user name and password. These security vulnerabilities illustrate why companies should look for ways to secure their webmail environment to prevent costly security breaches and comply with industry regulations.

To address everyday user behaviors that put companies at risk, last week Messageware released two security applications designed to prevent unauthorized access to OWA 2007 email accounts. Messageware's NavGuard and TimeGuard for OWA 2007.

MESSAGING NEWS CASE STUDY BRIEF:

Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches featuring Voltage Security and Eastman Kodak Company

Kodak, one of the world's leading imaging companies, needed help with its email security. "Our business units regularly communicate with outside clients and some of the information shared is confidential," said Janel Egli, IS systems and business analyst, for Eastman Kodak Company. "We needed a secure and easy way for our businesses and clients to send and receive email."

The company selected Voltage Security, Inc. "With Voltage, we no longer need to maintain keys for our employees or hand-hold them on how to use the system," continued Egli. Kodak cites Voltage as a "key component" to its overall risk management, regulatory compliance, and security strategies.

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