SaaS vs. On-premise archiving – the debate rages
During my industry analyst days, I got some perfunctory inquiries on hosted vs. on-premise email archiving. There was clearly some interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS), but there wasn’t much of a debate – on-premise archiving was the way to go for 85% of clients. Why? Mainly because they wanted mailbox management for end-user access to email, fast query times for eDiscovery, and the ability to customize the software to their specific needs.
Disclaimer: I work for an on-premise archiving vendor, so I technically am biased. However, I believe SaaS does have future in the archiving market…it’s just not pragmatic today for organizations that want to facilitate end-user access and eDiscovery.
As Nick Mehta (CEO of LiveOffice and a guy I highly respect) points out in his blog, SaaS archiving does provide the benefit of being up and running faster and cheaper than on-premise archiving. But, there are many functions that SaaS archiving does not provide today:
- Opportunity to develop internal expertise for advanced queries
- Mailbox management
- Integrated content archive (e.g. file system content, SharePoint)
- Integrated disaster recovery
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Offline access to mail for knowledge workers
Plus, hosted email archiving vendors have a difficult time meeting SLAs (this is know first-hand from my industry analyst experience – it was a huge complaint of users), rely on journaling which puts a huge strain on the email server, and suffer from poor query speeds (some eDiscovery searches take hours to run). Thus, for organizations that need to manage eDiscovery and end-user access to mail, SaaS archiving does not make sense today.
What does make sense is a hybrid solution, where an on-premise archiving product provides mailbox management, message extension, and eDiscovery while the hosted solution becomes a “tier” of storage where mail subject to compliance (e.g. has to be held by a 3rd party) or very long-term retention is sent to the hosted archive.
As always, your thoughts are welcome…SaaS archiving is an emerging market that will certainly continue to cross paths with the on-premise market. At the very least, it will be fun to watch things play out.
Happy 4th of July to all!
