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Filed under Education
Being a PR person, I find it hard not to think in terms of “the narrative”. Having been with MPC for six months now, this narrative continues to evolve with regard to how I think about our communications strategy – but it has a lot to do with how we serve the needs of the mid-market.
While that’s a topic for several more blog entries, for now I want to focus on the mid-market rationale that is driving one of our IT infrastructure products: MailFRAME. We are gearing up for a product enhancement announcement concerning MailFRAME (I could tell you more, but then I’d have to shoot you), so this particular product has been on my mind a lot lately.
Since introducing MailFRAME late last year, we’ve seen it gain a lot of traction; most recently in the education market. Given the ubiquitous nature of e-mail as the preferred way of communicating business proposals, confirming agreements, and even sending purchase orders and their attachments, it should hardly come as a surprise that messaging is one of the most critical business applications for small-to-midsize business (SMB). Even a couple of years ago, Storage Magazine editor Rich Castagna noted that “Archiving is no longer a luxury item reserved for financial services and big enterprise data shops.”
To dig into the context of Mr. Castagna’s statement, I recently interviewed an MPC technology partner, Stephen Spence, CEO of NorthSeas AMT. NorthSeas created the software that powers MailFRAME, and Steve has been an outstanding collaborator in sharing his knowledge of issues affecting the implementation of e-mail archival solutions for the markets we serve. In fact, it was the input from one of our local government customers, City of Southlake, Texas, that led to our partnership with Steve and his company. I’ll save that story for another time…but it’s a good one.
MB: For the sake of semantics, what are we talking about when we use the term “e-mail archival”? Is it simply the storage of e-mail messages?
SS: It’s more than that. To many in the storage circles, the term “archiving” refers to the removal of data from the operational network. In the context of e-mail, however, archiving means the long-term storage of e-mail with user access that isn’t unduly restricted by the age of the data or the location of the repository. By definition, then, any system or process that removes e-mail so that it is no longer accessible to a user cannot be an e-mail archiving solution. Today, there are many different reasons to not to delete e-mail. The value of e-mail data today has a much longer shelf-life than in the past, both for the employee and the employer.
MB: E-mail archiving isn’t new, so what kinds of organizations have been using it up to now?
SS: The need for e-mail archival first emerged when certain industries were faced with government regulations that extended to the management of electronic information. The most obvious of those regulations were the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOA) of 2002 for publicly traded companies, HIPPA for healthcare providers, and, of course, SEC Rule 17a for financial brokers. More recently, updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) have addressed the retention of e-mail messages for potential disclosure in a legal discovery process.
MB: So how does this affect the SMB market?
SS: Well, let’s go back to the last point of my earlier statement. Here’s a couple of statistics for you: in a recent survey, the international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski reported that a staggering 90 percent of U.S. corporations are in litigation. On top of that, Storage & Technology did a survey a couple of years ago that uncovered the fact that slightly more than half of U.S. businesses relied on back-up tapes for their long-term e-mail retention. By the way, that same survey revealed that only 11 percent of respondents did not expect their company would face a lawsuit. I think that if you connect the dots, they lead to a train wreck. Suffice it to say that companies that enter the discovery process of a civil procedure without an easily searchable repository of e-mail messages will struggle to comply with the new FRCP rules – and that struggle could be costly! It used to be that only large or public companies were concerned about e-mail archiving, but these new responsibilities for managing e-mail evidence affect all organizations – big and small, businesses as well as not-for-profit organizations.
MB: So, given the obvious FUD factor involved, why hasn’t the SMB market flocked en masse to e-mail archiving?
SS: It certainly hasn’t been because of a lack of concern over compliance! Even five years ago the Enterprise Storage Group reported that there were over 10,000 separate regulations that presided over record retention. From our vantage point, the problem with e-mail archival adoption among SMBs has had more to do with the availability of solutions tailored to the mid-market. You can certainly argue that SMBs face e-mail storage challenges that are similar in nature and criticality to those faced by larger enterprises. The problem has been that the cost and complexity of e-mail archiving solutions have typically been prohibitive for SMBs because most solutions are designed for the needs of the large enterprise or for the unique requirements of specialized industries. We wanted to change all that by partnering with MPC in the creation of MailFRAME.
MB: Aside from affordability, what have been the most important factors behind SMB adoption of MailFRAME?
SS: Certainly, the features of MailFRAME directly target the storage requirements of SMBs in the areas of archiving, compliance, and disaster recovery. Something else, however, that I think is really important to SMBs – and an attribute of MPC’s IT infrastructure product philosophy – is MailFRAME’s vendor-independence. Since MailFRAME stores messages as vendor-neutral files, customers are always free to change their e-mail server and avoid the vendor lock-in that is characteristic of so many of the industry’s e-mail archiving systems. Since the selection of an e-mail archiving system is a 10-20 year decision, it’s important that its selection not restrict the organization from making changes to its messaging in the future.
Filed under SMB
Mobile post sent by MpcPeriscope using Utterz. Replies. mp3
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