2012 is rumored as the tipping point for cloud. For the last four to five years, we have heard that cloud (Internet-delivered solutions) is about to go mainstream, however, this year it is not the hype, but real user benefits that are driving adoption.

What do I mean by this? Well people are not going out looking for cloud-based solutions (“I want some cloud”); instead they are looking for a solution to a real problem. Some users are unknowingly using a cloud-based solution (either in their business or personal lives) and are quickly seeing the benefits. Take for example Dropbox, a free tool for sharing (large) files across devices seamlessly, easily and from anywhere, where users adopt it from a need that it solves and not because of the technology factor behind it or because of any cloud hype.

Cloud computing is expected to enjoy an adoption rate and growth of between 30 to 40 percent per year, every year for the next five years and its promise of substantial benefits will drive this adoption. A 2012 customer study from Rise indicating that 94% of IT departments expect to expand their use of cloud in the next 12 months.

“Enterprises that embrace cloud computing reduce the amount of IT time and budget devoted to legacy systems and routine upgrades, which then increases the time and budget they have for more innovative projects. When IT innovation happens, business innovation is reached, which then supports job creation.” IDC Chief Research Officer John F. Gantz

The key benefits of cloud include:

• Easier more flexible access in a world of consumerization and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device),
• Increased resilience,
• Easier migration/implementation,
• Simplicity of use,
• Consistency across platforms ,
• Reduced cost of both implementation and on-going usage, and
• Innovation acceleration.

We still hear the downers on cloud – the news stories of gloom, fear and disdain. It was not so long ago that Internet shopping was placed in the same bucket, and yet this has become the norm and is continuing to enjoy compound growth and affect the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail arena.

There is plenty of hype on the ‘cloud’ and certainly plenty of discussion and content, and yet reports and audiences still show a need for education on the terms, benefits and realities of this growing form factor. Top concerns of businesses in survey after survey on the cloud, continue to be security, data sovereignty and reliability. In a recent end user study from the Cloud Industry Forum 62% of companies using or planning to use cloud indicated Data Security was their prime concern. When it comes to individuals the top concern in the IT arena is job loss and reduction of individual value.

There is no doubt cloud is bringing change. With the Internet and technology, we have a generation of users demanding access to their applications from their iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry or Android devices. We have entered an era where infinite IT power and information is available to a user on the smallest of devices, on the move and at an affordable price. As devices get more powerful, the Internet faster, the demand and supply of cloud applications will skyrocket and the power in the hands of the user will be greater than we have ever delivered before. Expect the marriage between mobility and the cloud to continue to grow.

So with this growth of cloud comes a change in skill requirements and job opportunities. One of CRN’s top 10 cloud predictions for 2012 is a growth in demand for cloud jobs as validated by an article in CIO magazine in early 2012. Cloud computing is and will have a major impact on skills across business, with IT being the most logically effected it will also impose itself onto roles in marketing, support and business roles in general. The demand for cloud-based skills already is showing signs of exploding. A recent report from Wanted Analytics, reported that hiring for cloud computing expertise showed a growth of 61 percent year over year. The cloud market is growing at such a pace that the number of job postings is accelerating and yet the talent qualifying for these roles is marginal.

Cloud isn’t all overcast and according to IDC ‘Spending on public and private cloud services is predicted to generate almost 14 million jobs worldwide between 2011 and 2015. More than one-third of cloud-enabled jobs will occur in the communications and media, banking, and discrete manufacturing industries.’ “For most organizations, cloud computing should be a no-brainer, given its ability to increase IT innovation and flexibility, lower capital costs, and help generate revenues that are multiples of spending,” said John F. Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice president at IDC. The top three industries expected to generate the most jobs from cloud computing are communications and media (2.4 million), banking (1.4 million) and discrete manufacturing (1.3million).

Cloud offers opportunities for those that embrace the new form factor and self-educate and certify themselves for the needs of employers today and tomorrow. More education is needed in cloud across all sectors to enable businesses to understand and utilize this important new technology to its advantage.

CompTIA’s Cloud Essentials certification is an example option that enables employees of varying roles to validate their cloud knowledge, take online training and exam condition testing, and differentiate themselves in the competitive job market. John McGlinchey,Vice President, Europe & Middle East, CompTIA commented “We have had a demand from the user market for a training curriculum with testing to support this rapidly growing new form factor. The demand and adoption is outstripping the skill base and it is key that individuals and businesses recognize and address this shortfall, before it becomes a serious issue for all concerned.”

More education is needed in cloud across all sectors to enable businesses to understand and utilize this important new technology option to its advantage and this need for understanding stretches past simply the border of the IT department. Expect to see more cloud courses and exams providing the market with the required validations in this new cloudy world. Ignoring cloud is no longer an option, utilizing it to your advantage is!

For more information on how cloud-based computing can benefit your company, email us or call us at: 770-603-0300.

With so much hype, Cloud is being pushed as the pervasive answer to everything! Rightly or wrongly! As more and more cloud solutions come to market and are campaigned to customers the blurring of differentiation between them is making the customer choice harder. It is increasingly easy for vendors to ‘cloud wash’ old technologies and re-market them as a full cloud solution, but not all will be successful and not all will deliver on the overpromised benefits that are often being made. Many of these solutions it could be argued are not truly cloud solutions and have large installs on customer sites with little of the true power coming from the internet. A large PC based application simply getting automatic updates from the cloud or calling on the cloud for its web interface for administration can be argued to not really be a cloud application and yet vendors are hanging their hats on these concepts in an effort to cash in on the cloud hype! We are also seeing large vendors in their times of cloud exploration getting it wrong and having to adjust strategies.

For example Cisco pulled its hosted mail platform from the market in early 2011 (http://www.talkincloud.com/cisco-kills-hosted-e-mail-service) and Iron Mountain has also recently announced the death tool on its Public Cloud Storage Business (http://www.talkincloud.com/iron-mountain-kills-its-public-cloud-storage-business). Webroot also in early 2012 announced the closing of its email cloud business (http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/198882-1326749222-infosec-technologies-launches-webroot-endoflife-advice-line.html) and the selling off of its cloud archiving business (http://www.crn.com/news/security/232500166/sonian-buys-webroot-e-mail-archiving-business.htm)

We are seeing trends of new cloud certifications, new cloud vendors, existing vendors cloud-washing old products and increasing volumes of articles touting the good, bad and the ugly of cloud solutions. Customers and the various channels to market have a need and responsibility to themselves to self educate and better understand cloud technologies that can benefit or challenge their business models moving forwards.

Following the recent announcement by Webroot that they are exiting the email security business and not accepting new orders or renewals for this service, Blended Systems, (dba SaasExperts.net) has launched a free impartial telephone help-line open to Webroot business customers.

As a Webroot Platinum partner, Blended Systems decided to take action to guide customers through this period of uncertainty and is ideally qualified to provide clarity and advice on what to do as a user of the Webroot SaaS Services.

Over the last four months, SaasExperts.net has undertaken a comprehensive technical and commercial review of the Email and Web Security as a Service (SaaS) market. We have completed intensive due diligence on leading vendors to identify a range of solutions that best fit Webroot’s customers’ specific needs, all with minimum migration service disruption. The vendor portfolio comprises: Postini, MX Logic, ZixCorp, Sonian Email Archive, Hosted Exchange 2010, Google Apps for Business, ESET endpoint protection and Sophos.

“We have strong knowledge of the Webroot platforms and also other SaaS solutions and are able to offer the best advice on what, how and when to migrate user’s protection,” commented Bob Stevens, CIO, Blended Systems. He continued: “We wanted to find a constructive and immediate way to help Webroot customers and share our understanding of how this development impacts their operations and review the options open to them both technically and commercially.”

One SaasExperts law office customer made the migration from Webroot to Postini or to MX Logic.

Jeramy Romine commented: “As an IT Administrator for a law firm we relied on Webroot for our SPAM filtering for approximately two years. Their service was always top notch and we never experienced any issues with their service. We were shocked to find out that Webroot was getting out of the email security business leaving us in a position to find another vendor quickly that could eliminate downtime and be seamless to end users. Blended Systems helped us make the transition to Postini in one evening with no downtime and without the users even knowing we made the change until the next morning when they had received their activation email. It was a simple process for them to follow a link and access their quarantine log yet I could still maintain control over White/Black lists and other features. I would recommend Blended Systems to any administrator looking for SPAM prevention or any other hosted solution.”

The advice line will be handled by the Blended Systems support and technical team who will answer questions and any concerns around Webroot Email Security, other Webroot security services and information on alternative security solutions. Advice on seamless migration options and recommended timescales is also available.

Inquiries can be made by email by going to: End-of-Life Helpline or by calling 877-603-0301.

Part of the answer is found in another question, “Compared to what?” If you have never had a good collaborative system these are both shiny. When a big player like Microsoft of Google finally enter a product space, it legitimizes the space.

A second legitimate comparison is to on-premise solutions. Getting all the new cool features available when you are a smaller organization is quite expensive. If you are using Exchange 2000 or 2007 you have to migrate to Exchange 2010 and add servers to handle all the new technology. That means seriously large capital expenditures during these economic challenging times. Migrating instead to cloud-based system preserves precious capital and gives the company a flexible operating expense that reacts to the expansion and contraction of the business.

So, the technology is shiny but, for businesses with less than 1,000 users, does Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365 live up to their press?

In a recent survey on the Future of SaaS, respondents indicated their concerns with using a hosted solution. We posted responses to the top four previously: Security, Uptime, Data Ownership & Retrieve-ability. As this chart shows, both Google and Microsoft have a history of outsiders accessing client information and hours of outages.

Respondents to the survey confirmed that what businesses of between 25-250 need is a system that will give them the full experience of Microsoft Exchange 2010 with the ability to communicate and share documents. In other words, they need all the features offered by the giants but with the support and assistance the giants offer only to the 1,000 plus clients.

That experience is what Blended Systems’ Hosted Exchange 2010 offers. With over 10 years and 300,000 mailboxes in our four secure data centers, our clients have access to desktop and mobile email and calendaring via Exchange 2010, file sharing and management via SharePoint, secure IM and Communications via Lync, email encryption, email archiving, Digital PBX and on-line backups. In other words, what the giants offer but, for smaller organization in addition to enterprise clients.

Compare for yourself: Blended Systems HE vs O365 and Blended Systems HE vs Google Apps. Visit www.saasexperts.net to get more information on all our cloud-based services. To get your more immediate questions answered, email or call us at 770-603-0300.

• Security – Does anyone have unauthorized access to my data in the “cloud”? (64% of respondents)
• Uptime – Can I get to my data when I need to? (61%)
• Ownership – Who owns our data? (55%)
• Retrieve-ability – Can we retrieve our data if we want to take it back on-premise? (42%)

Respondents are permitted to select more than one concern.

We saw some shifting in the relative ranking of these top four but, these four always stayed on top. We will discuss Retrieve-ability in this last in the series of blog posts.

Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

Can we get our data back?

For most organizations, once they move to a SaaS provider for their hosted service, there is little need to move again. We have a renewal/retention rate of over 95% with our clients across our various vendor partners. The remaining 5% usually go out of business or get purchased.

The is important question of retrieve-ability is one that people ask while they are exploring potential SaaS providers to be sure they are not on a one-way road with a hosting provider. There are two primary reasons for ensuring that you can get your data back:

1. You wish to take the application back on-premise
2. For whatever reason, you wish to change hosting vendors

In either case, you need to get your data back in a useful format. We have encountered one email archive vendor that only allows data extraction in PDF format which is worthless in a host migration.

Technically, you should be able to import/export your data from a hosted system just as you would an on-premise system. The only difference should be the physical location of the server.

Important considerations

Whatever the reason, be sure you understand the time-frame involved in the export. Some hosting services have a policy that once you stop their service, there is no guarantee that your data will be available for export. Be sure your service time includes enough time for your transition time before you stop the service.

Specific questions to ask:

1. What does it take to export our data?
2. What export formats are available?
3. Can we export ourselves or must we depend on a vendor’s back-end engineers to do the export?
4. What is the cost of the export?
5. How rapidly can the export be done?

Final Thoughts

Just as in the previous post on Data Ownership, it is your data regardless whether held in your data center or on a virtual server in the cloud. To make a long blog shorter, the legal dictum, Vox emissa volat, litera scripta manet. (While words spoken may fly away, what is written remains.) is still wise. In other words, “Get it in writing!”

So, how do you become comfortable with a potential SaaS vendor? Ask questions and read the SLA. Contrast their solution among vendors and your on-premise solution. For a list of good questions to ask, read our, Critical Questions to Ask a Potential SaaS Provider.

To discuss cloud-based services for your organization, email us or call us at 770-603-0300. Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

• Security – Does anyone have unauthorized access to my data in the “cloud”? (57% of respondents)
• Uptime – Can I get to my data when I need to? (62%)
• Ownership – Who owns our data? (52%)
• Retrieve-ability – Can we retrieve our data if we want to take it back on-premise? (48%)

Respondents are permitted to select more than one concern.

We may see some shift in the ordering of these concerns but, we expect these to remain the top four. We will discuss Ownership in this series of blog entries.

Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

Data Ownership

Well duh, it’s our data so of course we own it! Really? Are you sure? After all, it’s on some other company’s computer. Facebook’s recent attempt to change its terms of use brought up this topic for another look.

This topic has been banged around for some time now so it is no surprise that 52% of the survey respondents are concerned about it.

“Why would the provider want to take ownership of a client’s data?” There is no benefit to a SaaS provider taking ownership or control of a client’s data. The SaaS provider is in the business of providing the client with services not pirating your data. The SLA and agreement should cover the contingencies.

An interesting article entitled, Cloud service consumers have the right to retain ownership, use and control of their own data is found at Data Ownership and Control 6 Rights for Cloud Service Customers in CIO Zone.

The Legal Ownership Question

What happens when the client is faced with an e-Discovery demand? This is another reason SaaS providers have no interest in ownership of a client’s data. They would be embroiled every time any of their clients was sued.

Virtually all e-Discovery today contains a request for all email sent or received by the relevant parties pertaining to the items listed in the complaint. So what if a sheriff comes knocking on a SaaS provider’s door with a subpoena for access to a client’s records?  A recent interesting article discusses this issue.

Regardless of your personal, political or patriotic position on the WikiLeaks saga; as a consumer of cloud computing services you have to feel comfortable that your business is your business and should only be taken down by someone that has legal authority – not your hosting provider under pressure from their government. Amazon Confirms Public Cloud Fears.

It is your data regardless whether it is held in your data center or on a virtual server in the cloud. To make a long blog shorter, the legal dictum, Vox emissa volat, litera scripta manet. (While words spoken may fly away, what is written remains.) is still wise. In other words, “Get it in writing!”

So, how do you become comfortable with a potential SaaS vendor? Ask questions. Contrast their solution among vendors and your on-premise solution. For a list of good questions to ask, read our, Critical Questions to Ask a Potential SaaS Provider.

To discuss cloud-based services for your organization, email us or call us at 770-603-0300. Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

• Security – Does anyone have unauthorized access to my data in the “cloud”? (59% of respondents)
• Uptime – Can I get to my data when I need to? (64%)
• Ownership – Who owns our data? (55%)
• Retrieve-ability – Can we retrieve our data if we want to take it back on-premise? (50%)

Respondents are permitted to select more than one concern.

We may see some shift in the ordering of these concerns but, we expect these to remain the top four. We’ll cover each of the four in the next several blog entries. The blog on Security was posted earlier.

Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

Uptime – Can I get to my data when I need to?

What good is secure data if you can’t gain access to it? Microsoft’s recent and recurrent downtime problems have brought this issue front and center again.

Having a service hosted is an important part of your business. To a SaaS provider, hosting services is their entire business. SaaS providers stake their entire reputation on uptime and security. A loss of reputation in either one will see a rush of businesses migrating to a more capable provider.

Concerns about uptime involve four main questions:

1. What percent of time is the service guaranteed to be available?
2. What counts as downtime?
3. How does a SaaS provider prevent downtime?
4. Are there penalties involved for excessive downtime expressed in the Service Level Agreement?

How many “9″s is enough?

Uptime is measured as a percentage of service availability against unavailability. An uptime of 100% may be desirable but if it were possible to achieve, it would be very expensive. So the question is,  “How much uptime can we afford?” or “How much downtime is tolerable?”

Some large SaaS providers promise 99.9% uptime. That sounds like a great until you realize that 99.9% uptime means downtime of over 43 minutes per month or over 8¾ hours per year. This may tolerable if the downtime occurred only on Sundays at 2 AM. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. The best SaaS providers will guarantee 99.999% uptime; only 25 seconds per month or 5 minutes of downtime per year.

As you consider migrating from an on-premise solution to a SaaS solution, compare the downtime promised against the downtime in your own data center. Usually, SaaS providers’ uptime far exceeds that of the data centers in the small- to medium-sized businesses.

Scheduled vs. unscheduled downtime

So, when a server needs a patch or a switch needs to be changed out. Does that count as downtime? Well, sometimes.

Some providers define scheduled maintenance as “planned outages” rather than downtime. Most on-premise data center tolerate a level of planned outages for upgrades, reboots & patches. But, what about critical services for which any downtime costs an organization lost revenue? It costs an airline reservation system approximately $89,000 per hour of downtime. In that case, downtime is downtime period.

When evaluating a potential SaaS provider find out their SLA has to say about which type of downtime counts against their uptime calculations.

How does a SaaS provider prevent downtime?

When an on-premise server is down, only that organization is affected. When a SaaS provider’s  multi-tenant server goes down, all the affected organizations are down. A excellent SaaS provider has clusters of servers with built-in redundancy and replication. These clusters are often housed in geographically dispersed data centers. That ensures the services will be available when you need them. Our recommended email archive SaaS provider (Sonian) has a cross-cluster uptime of 99.999,999,999% (that’s 11 “9″s) of uptime.

With this level of SaaS providers, a client’s data is hosted on a primary server. That server is coupled with a redundant server in a different cluster as well as a backup server. We have a vendor-partner with such an arrangement which has a promised 99.999% uptime and an historic track record of 100% uptime over 10 years.

Penalties for excess downtime

An explanation as to why we are such strong advocates of cloud-based services may be in order. Several years ago the power distribution room in our office building blew a fuse. It took building management four days to restore power. What did they offer their tenants as recompense? A Mexican buffet complete with a Mariachi band. Now, I enjoy occasional Mexican food and music but, four days without power and all they come with is tacos and re-fried beans? Really?

Leaving the lessons learned about disaster recovery and redundancy plans aside, What financial compensation for excessive downtime does the SaaS provider offer?  The best ones offer a sliding scale based based on monthly calculations. The more downtime, the greater the penalty.

So, how do you become comfortable with a potential SaaS vendor? Ask questions. Contrast their solution among vendors and your on-premise solution. For a list of good questions to ask, read our, Questions to Ask a Potential SaaS Provider.

To discuss cloud-based services for your organization, email us or call us at 770-603-0300. Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

• Security – Does anyone have unauthorized access to my data in the “cloud”? (57% of respondents)
• Uptime – Can I get to my data when I need to? (62%)
• Ownership – Who owns our data? (52%)
• Retrieve-ability – Can we retrieve our data if we want to take it back on-premise? (48%)

Respondents are permitted to select more than one concern.

We may see some shift in the ordering of these concerns but, we expect these to remain the top four.

Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

Security

The security concern of using a cloud-based service (SaaS) is the same as of an on-premise service. The familiar model of servers in an on-premise data center gives a sense of security. Having the server or service somewhere “in the cloud” brings about a sense of uncertainty. You can’t point to anything meaningful. Of course, the same can be said of using a bank instead of stuffing money under the mattress. Both have a set of risks with which you need to be comfortable.

Security involves two main questions:

1. Does the cloud-based service hold data or just process it?
2. How can a user gain access to the data?

Data processors

An Email security service simply processes the email stream. They may hold spam in a queue awaiting someone to approve of messages deemed not to be spam. Past that, the email security services are not email repositories so, here is no data (beyond the spam queue) to see even it were possible to hack into it. There are logs of processing statistics but, there are no message content in those logs. The data is on your email server.

Web security services act as transparent proxies so, no data beyond logs are held by the proxy. Those logs usually show browser and bandwidth histories and may identify users’ specific browsing habits. These systems usually can be configured not to show user’s identity for greater privacy.

Data repositories

In contrast to the above, Hosted services such as email, business intelligence and CRM are data repositories and are of more concern. Unless you have arranged for the use of an entire real or virtual server, your data will be held on a multi-tenant server. All that means is that large capacious clusters of servers host your system along with other organizations. Just as your on-premise server farm can host multiple email post offices each with discrete sets of users, large multi-tenant server systems host multiple systems each for discrete sets of companies’ users.

Access to data

Studies on unauthorized access show that in the majority of cases, the unauthorized access was by someone inside the organization; someone who knew a login and password. The same problem will hold with a hosted service. To prevent someone outside your organization from gaining access, cloud-based systems strictly control the channels through which access can be made. Access to the data on a cloud-based server is via secure Internet connection (https) or a point-to-point VPN. Still, if users are not careful with logins and passwords, it doesn’t matter whether it is to an on-premise or cloud-based service.

A key to confidence in a SaaS data repository is confirming if the provider’s hosting and staff is SAS 70 Type II complaint. This covers all provider’s security, process, and hosting ability. It’s the highest level of audit done on hosted providers. It is unlikely that an organization’s on-premise could pass a SAS 70 Type II compliance audit.

Physical security of the data

Here is where most of first-time clients are surprised. Typically, cloud-based services are far more secure than all but the most extreme on-premise data center. They have to be since their reputation depends on security of your data. These are not some lashed-together servers in someone’s utility closet. Here’s an example of our hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 system contrasted with typical on-premise conditions.

Our system consists of four clusters of servers throughout the US. Additional clusters are in the UK. Each cluster has the following security layers:

Putting in a massive cluster of redundant and replicating servers in such highly secure data centers is usually beyond the budget and need of most organizations. What a cloud-based system offers most organizations is secure, pay-as-you-use systems.

So, how do you become comfortable with a potential SaaS vendor? Ask questions. Contrast their solution among vendors and your on-premise solution. For a list of good questions to ask, read our, Critical Questions to Ask a Potential SaaS Provider.

To discuss cloud-based services for your organization, email us or call us at 770-603-0300. Click the link to download the results in our Whitepaper- The Future of SaaS – Survey Results.

Why select Blended Systems’ hosted Exchange 2010?

Blended Systems’ first operating principle is: Services are more important than Servers. As long as the service is secure and available, it does not matter where the server is. Microsoft’s infrastructure is clearly suspect after yet again failing to provide adequate services to their customers. You need to ask some serious questions instead of assuming big names come with excellent services for your unique needs.

Uptime SLA

We offer a 99.999 percent uptime service level agreement backed by financial teeth. Our four multi-million dollar infrastructure includes datacenters featuring Dell, EMC and Cisco hardware and multiple connections to Tier-1 Internet providers – assuring high availability and the fastest round trip for your email. This Fortune 50 infrastructure is finally available to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Infrastructure you can count on

At Blended Systems, the premium infrastructure behind our solutions is built on more than 10 years of Exchange hosting experience. This enables us to offer a 99.999 percent uptime SLA – that’s less than six minutes of downtime per year. To ensure we consistently meet or exceed the service expectations of our users, we never stop investing in infrastructure.

• Highly redundant industry-leading architecture: Load-balanced Outlook/Entourage/OWA/
  ActiveSync/IMAP/POP/LDAP/Webdav (EWS for 2010)
• Data replication: In addition to running regular backups, Blended Systems replicates Exchange 2010 data in real time from one set of premium hardware to another.  This protects the critical information your business keeps within Exchange, even in the event of hardware failure or database corruption.  It also enables Blended Systems to rapidly restore the full functionality of your Exchange environment should an issue occur.
• ‘Choose your datacenter site location’ option: Do you need to support a distributed work force with hosted Exchange services?  Blended Systems lets you choose the datacenter closest to your individual users to ensure your data travels the shortest, fastest route possible.
• Multi-million dollar, continually upgraded hardware: Best-in-class servers, storage and network hardware from Dell, EMC and Cisco are the cornerstone of our infrastructure. For example, each datacenter operates redundant Cisco carrier class switches with firewall and load balancing modules. Built for availability and throughput, this flagship technology virtually eliminates disconnects due to server availability or network issues.

We focus on small-medium sized businesses

SMB have all the same requirements as industry giants but, have to do without the staff to meet those requirements. Using Blended Systems’ hosted Exchange 2010 or Business Productivity Suite, gives you the technology with the backing of dedicated Microsoft Exchange technicians and migration specialists just a phone call or email message away. Your IT team can focus on projects that make the business money. Let us handle the server administration, updating, backups and maintenance routines.

Contact Blended Systems at: 770-603-0300 or by email for more information.

1. How much archive storage will we get?
   Email storage is always a question on an email server. However when email is archived, the storage question becomes a factor in that every piece of mail is stored until the records retention schedule clears it to be deleted. Be sure you understand the per Gb charge for archived mail, else you may be in for an unpleasant surprise in future years. – Our archive solutions offer unlimited storage included in the flat per user per month fee.
2. How long can the email be retained in the archive and at what charge?
   Even without regulatory demands, some email messages may be required to be retained for years. When an e-discovery request comes in, you may be required to mark specific categories of messages to be exempt from the ordinary records retention policy. Until that Legal Hold is in place, those messages must be available for retrieval. – Our archive solutions offers unlimited email retention as part of the flat per user per month fee.
3. Where is the archive storage?
   On-premise solutions hold the archive either on the same drive as the email store itself or on an appliance in the data center. One more box to capitalize, power, cool, manage, update and backup for as long as the data must remain in the archive. – Our hosted archive solutions store your archive in a data center with multi-layered security and offers an SLA on backups and up-time availability.
4. How often is email uploaded to archive?
   Archive upload frequency is usually a function of an archive collector’s ability. This may be determined by the email system it self. Microsoft Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 each have different requirements on how their journaling archive collector functions. – With our hosted archive solutions, you can select the type of collector to match your email system as well as the frequency of email upload.
5. How can we import our existing email?
   The better archive vendors have a system of either uploading your existing PST/NSF files directly or copying them to a USB drive and sending it to the archive repository. – Our system allows for both these types of email ingestion.
6. What is the cost per user for the archive?
   The effective cost per user accounts for any per user charge plus each user’s portion of the storage being used. If there is a start-up charge, that must be taken effect as well. – Our email archive solution charges a flat fee per user per month. Depending on the amount and type of ingestion you need, there may be a nominal charge per Gb.
7. What is the cost per Gb of storage?
   Some systems charge for any storage or for amounts of storage above some minimum. Without knowledge of your potential future exposure, you may be in for the same kind of ever-expanding storage cost you face on your email server itself. – Our email archive solutions offer unlimited storage included in the flat per user per month fee.
8. What formats are available for export?
   Having messages in an archive do you no good if you can’t export them in a useful format. Common export formats are: PDF, PST, EML or native email formats. – Our hosted archive solutions offer all of these at no extra charge.
9. Can we grant full or selective access to portions of the archive to an e-discovery team?
   Granular access to the archive gives an e-discovery team, internal HR personnel or department heads just the relevant messages they need to perform their tasks. Personal archive access gives users access to only their own messages. – Our solutions offer both compliance as well as personal archive solutions.
10. Can users get access to their own archive for searches and retrieval?
    One of the benefits of an archive system is that users can go find an email they previously deleted. One less call to the IT team. – As long as your users have a personal archive option either in their email client or on-line they can restore their own deleted messages, search, send and retrieve messages directly from the archive.

Consider the answers to these questions well. Your precious data will be in their hands. To find out how the services we offer stack up to these question, email or call us at: 770-603-0300.