Cloud email storage must deliver business continuity

With the masses of volumes of data generated and shared everyday via email and the business need to deliver today's increasingly mobile workforce with on demand access to that information from anywhere whenever they need it, email archiving must also deliver business continuity in the event of an email system failure - and it has to be interactive.

"Businesses are extremely reliant on email. Millions of emailtransactions are exchanged every single day which means massive volumes of business-critical information, instructions, confirmations and orders are housed in emailinboxes and later in email archives," says Dries Morris, operations director at Securicom, a specialist IT security services company.

Low productivity

"When users can't access this information when they need it, they can't do their jobs. Their productivity is hampered. For business continuity, cloud-based email archiving systems must be integrated and they must give users direct access to new and archived email. It's become expected."

He says there is a growing move toward email archiving solutions that not only allow companies to store electronic transactions securely off-site; but also give employees uninterrupted ability to access that data from anywhere and using whatever device they choose. There is a convergence of email archiving and disaster recovery systems.

Acknowledging this convergence, Securicom has given its email storage and recovery solution, MailVault, a few strategic nips and tucks to make it a snugger fit with company needs - accessibility and business continuity being tops. The solution is fully hosted in the cloud by Securicom and provides complete and reliable real-time backup of all electronic communication in a central archive that is equal to housing a fully-redundant system.

Three ways to interact

It answers to the demand for accessibility by providing users with three ways to immediately access and interact with stored messages - via a dedicated web-interface using any Internet-enabled device, through a convenient Outlook Plug-in, and through the just-released MailVault App for iPhones. The solution has advanced search capabilities to make it quick and easy to find required information contained in email communication.

"We've made the system as intuitive as possible. Everything that arrives in the inbox is instantaneously stored in the MailVault archives so users have up to date access to all new emails even when they are not connected to, or can't access, the email server for whatever reason. With MailVault, users also have direct access to archived messages that have been long gone from their inboxes.

"Using MailVault Plug-in, all of this can be done from within their usual email system such as Outlook. Now, with the MailVault App, users can get into their company emails, new and old, and send and receive messages using their iPhone," he explains.

Excellent security

The solution can be integrated with Securicom's on demand data banking service, DataVault which provides anytime-access to data stored in the Securicom cloud. The solution delivers top-notch security. Files are encrypted in transit and at rest at Securicom's high security data centres which are all local so companies know that their data isn't shacked up somewhere else in the world where they have no idea or control of how secure it is.

"Keeping data local is essential to good governance and legal compliance. When companies enlist a cloud provider for email archiving or data banking, they must make sure that the data isn't going to be stored off-shore," says Morris.