Is Your Archiving System Broken?

One comment we hear from IT buyers is that they looking to replace their archiving system because it’s either not working correctly, is no longer suitable for their needs or has become too troublesome to manage.

It’s not a trivial decision to replace an archiving or information management system: the old archives need to be maintained or migrated, the new system may not work the same way as the old one, and the company needs to invest in yet another archiving system.

When is it logical to replace an archiving solution?

Many companies find themselves in the position that replacing their archiving system is logical.  What drives this, we wondered?  How do companies justify it? 

There are many factors affecting existing or legacy archiving systems.   Some of the earlier and very popular ones – like Mimosa and Email Xtender – have reached their end-of-life, and the cost to upgrade to those companies’ replacement systems is substantial.  On other systems, users have had years of frustration with search buttons that don’t work, or eDiscovery add-ins that failed.  IT may have put a “replacement archiving solution” into their budgets several years ago, and it is only now coming up as a current project.

Today’s data is different

The data being saved has changed from what early archiving solutions were designed to address.  The velocity of today’s email is manifold greater than when a legacy system was installed.  The onerous mailbox quotas built-in to earlier versions of Exchange are gone (however, email growth still outpaces annual reductions in storage costs, something companies are having to come to grips with).   Companies who allowed PST files to be created even though they had installed archiving are wrestling with corrupted and orphaned PST files that are rendered useless.

Does a company replace, adapt or migrate?

Companies are also pondering whether to install a new archiving solution, simply adapt their processes to the archiving features now built into newer versions of Exchange, or move their whole email system to a hosted environment – and in some cases, a hybrid one where part remains on-premise, and part is in a public cloud.

C2C has participated in many such decisions; our ArchiveOne is continually updated and is one of the few platforms that has been able to keep up with changes in both the business and IT environments.

In future blogs, we’ll share some of the decision-points companies have arrived at when considering what do with a “broken archiving system.”