Sonian Archive

Sonian Archive is a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to search through archived mail quickly and easily. Once the mail server has been synced with Sonian servers and messages copied over, businesses can use the built-in search tools to find specific attachments and messages. Customers can conduct searches on the platform as part of eDiscovery and tag relevant messages for review or to recover data that was inadvertently deleted from the servers.

The Sonian Archive is a software-as-a-service offering that gives IT administrators, search administrators, and end-users the ability to search, retrieve, classify, download, forward, audit, and perform additional eDiscovery tasks on archived emails. Pricing is $4 per mailbox per month and customers receive unlimited storage and support.

For businesses under regulatory oversight and subject to compliance rules, having a regular mail archive is critical. For these companies, not archiving can lead to huge fines, and not being able to find messages can drive up costs during court proceedings.

Who's it for?
Many small businesses assume they are too small to have to worry about legal and regulatory requirements for email archiving. Law firms, small financial services firms, and health providers are among the many small businesses that are required to retain all electronic communications for a certain period of time, and be able to retrieve relevant messages when necessary. For those businesses, a cloud-based archiving and eDiscovery platform like Sonian is much more affordable than investing in storage and sifting through all backups to find specific emails.

Businesses also can use Sonian as alternative storage instead of as an archiving platform. As user mailboxes balloon out of control, IT managers have to either put a size quota on user mailboxes or force users to purge older messages. With Sonian, IT can store messages received fairly recently on the local network, and have a policy to automatically move messages older than that timeframe to Sonian Archive. Users can easily search on the platform to find messages, download relevant attachments and restore messages back to the inbox. By using Sonian, these businesses can restrict local storage and keep costs low without forcing users to lose critical data.

The platform can also be used as off-site backup, with user inboxes automatically syncing back to Sonian servers. In case of disaster or downtime, employees can still have access to previously received messages while IT recovers inboxes and associated documents off the cloud.

Setup and Maintenance
As a software as a service, setup is non-existent. Sonian works with the solution providers and other third-party companies to support Sonian users. Once the customer has accounts on the archiving platform, it's a matter of configuring the mail servers to sync with Sonian servers and push messages up to the cloud in regular intervals. The initial message transfer is usually handled by the provider, according to Sonian.

After the mail has been archived properly, customers generally get a tour of the platform to learn how to create searches and how to manage the eDiscovery process. Each customer gets a custom URL to the archive environment.

The platform works with a variety of mail platforms, including Microsoft Exchange, LotusLive, GroupWise, Kerio, and VMware's Zimbra. I would love to see this expand to include more platforms until it become ubiquitous.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/9R8-W4diVvI/0,2817,2407793,00.asp

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