Invasive corporate governance legislation in concert with the tough global economic climate has forced companies of all size to scale up their efforts with regard to backing-up and archiving their business critical information.  Despite the fact that disaster recovery solutions are complex and costly entities to architect and manage, legislative environments around the world, not to mention various verticals have varying regulations that companies must adhere to. “In fact, South Africa’s own legislative policies around the length of time and forms in which digital information, such as e-mail, should be stored are unclear and still in the process of being defined,” says Hayden Lamberti, Applications Solutions Business Unit Manager at Internet Solutions.

 

“In a situation such as this,” Lamberti says, “companies would be best advised to opt for the most conservative option possible, which involves the storage of information and data. For example, storing e-mails in a completely tamper-proof format for the maximum amount of time possible which is generally eight years.”  However, Lamberti comments that the only drawback to taking this route is that it adds substantial effort, operational expense and management overhead to the mix. “It’s also risky, since the final legislation could end up being vastly different from what the company assumes and caters for now.”

 

Lamberti say this is the primary reason smaller companies are looking towards outsourced partners capable of shouldering this burden on their behalf. “An excellent example of this in practice is the IS Mail Archiving solution, which is designed for both small companies that don’t have any form of e-mail archiving or backup solution and large companies that have provisioned for a backup and archival solution, but want an additional safeguard,” says Lamberti.

 

“For small companies it’s a no brainer,” he continues, “since there’s no way they would be able to gain access to a solution with the capabilities that IS Mail Archiving offers at a remotely comparable cost.  “Large companies are however attracted to the solution because it allows them to shift the responsibility for archiving their e-mail information for a prescribed length of time in an tamper-proof format to a specialist party such as ourselves,” says Lamberti. It also means they are able to comply with local legislative and vertical industry regulations with immediate effect, without employing a resource that’s specialised in the area of IT compliance or going through the process of managing the backup and archival process in-house. “It’s a ‘set-and-forget’ way of handling a company’s compliance as opposed to constantly conducting audits and checks or constantly refining the methodology,” he explains.

 

Lamberti says that IS Mail Archiving has also been designed to work with a customer’s current Microsoft Exchange environment, or to dovetail as an added feature to a current hosted-Exchange service from Internet Solutions. “As such, it will back-end straight into a customer’s existing Active Directory environment and even allow users to interact with their archives or backups directly through a web-interface should the company’s corporate IT policy deem this appropriate,” he says. “They can of course block this functionality if their policy prohibits users from interacting directly with backups and archives.”

 

The drawback of doing this is however that every time a user needs to retrieve an e-mail, they will need to involve the IT department. Since most small companies don’t have a dedicated IT resource, allowing users to interact with archived and backed-up e-mails greatly simplifies the company’s information management.  Lamberti says that the vast majority of customers using the solution have hailed it as a true lifesaver. “For the smallest of our customers with hosted-Exchange environments, IS Preserv8 makes our cloud-based groupware offering rival the most sophisticated enterprise-grade solutions being run at South Africa’s largest and most technology-capable organisations,” he explains. “Similarly it is extremely valuable to medium and large organisations that have existing on-premise Exchange servers, giving them the piece of mind to not worry about their e-mail backup and archival processes.”

 

“Lastly,” Lamberti says, “many of our largest customers find IS Mail Archiving to be an essential backup for their own in-house disaster recovery solutions and one that can play the role of stopgap – giving users access to a fully-hosted instance of their groupware information while an on-site recovery takes place after a disaster.

 

“We believe companies of all sizes will see the value in this solution,” he adds. “Its proof that the cloud-computing model is both viable and more feature rich than many anticipate,” he concludes.

 

TAMMY DU PREEZ Communications Manager   Tel: 087 365 7768   Tel: +27 (11) 575 7768   Fax: +27 (11) 576 7768​ ​