The website, which was redesigned in the fall of 2011, showcases ArcMail’s leadership status in the enterprise information archiving industry and highlights the company’s comprehensive social media and email archiving services.

In a joint press release issued about the award, MCG Founder and CEO Brett Schklar acknowledged the team collaboration that went into the site design. “When a client knows what they want, understands what needs to be measured from a marketing standpoint, and demonstrates a 100 percent dedication to success, it makes our ability to deliver that much easier,” said Schklar. “WaLa!’s commitment to meeting and exceeding its customers’ information archiving needs is reflected in our website design, and we’re very proud to have collaborated with them to earn this accolade from the Colorado BMA.”

WaLa! and ArcMail CEO Rory Welch echoed these sentiments by saying, “We’d like to thank the Colorado BMA for recognizing both Market Creation Group and WaLa! with this prestigious award. Countless hours of time and hard work went into the design and implementation, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. We’re extremely proud of the website as a vehicle for showcasing our unique value proposition to our customers, prospects and other stakeholders across North America.”

To learn more, please read the full press release.

While it’s understandable that many healthcare providers are hesitant to promote social media as a way to research or communicate about health-related topics, the Health Research Institute (HRI) at PwC has released a study stating that one in three people are doing just that. So, what does this mean for the industry? Especially one that has strict laws related to doctor/patient communications? It may be time for them to find the right balance between using social media to create an open dialog with current patients and promoting expertise to potential patients, while still meeting legal compliance regulations.

Why healthcare providers can no longer ignore social media.

HRI’s social media survey, which included more than 1,000 U.S. consumers and 124 members of the eHealth Initiative, found that there is a rapidly growing trend in consumers using social media to seek out and post information about health care topics.

• 1 in 3 consumers has used social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and to find medical information, track and share symptoms, and share opinions about their doctors, drugs, treatments, medical devices and health plans.
• 4 out of 10 consumers have used social media to find health-related reviews (i.e., of treatments or physicians).
• 1 in 3 has looked for information related to other patients’ experiences with their disease.
• 1 in 4 has posted about their health experiences.
• 1 in 5 has joined a health forum or community.

How much does social media affect patients’ health decisions? 

The statistics may surprise you. When asked how social media would affect their health decisions:

• 45% said it would affect their decision to get a second opinion.
• 41% percent said it would affect their choice of a specific doctor, hospital or medical facility.
• 34% percent said it would affect their decision about taking a certain medication.
• 90% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would trust information they found there.

5 tips for kicking-off your social media presence while minimizing legal risk.

1. Create a social media policy that explicitly states what content can and cannot be communicated via social media sites and who is allowed to communicate on behalf of your organization.
2. Use privacy settings that safeguard personal information and ensure patient privacy/confidentiality is maintained.
3. Routinely monitor information to ensure that social media content is accurate and appropriate.
4. Maintain appropriate boundaries between physicians and patients online.
5. Ensure you archive social media communications for eDiscovery.

What type of healthcare information are you or your organization already sharing on social media?

Please share your comments and feedback below.

In prior blog posts, we’ve debated how the rise of social media in the workplace – including instant messaging, Chatter and Facebook – will impact the use of emails in a business setting. While there is definitely evidence that social media is being used in place of email in specific situations (i.e. during work travel or for quick business meetings and check-ins), it’s been difficult to predict if social media would eventually cause email to go by the wayside. According to The Radicati Group, that’s not something that we should anticipate happening anytime in the next several years.

 Email Usage to Rise Along with Social Media

In The Radicati Group’s  “Email Statistic Report, 2012-2016,” which includes business and consumer email usage statistics broken out by regions worldwide, states that email usage will not begin declining as some people have anticipated, but will actually increase from 3.3 billion email accounts in 2012 to 4.3 billion accounts by the end of 2016, representing an average annual growth rate of 6% year-over-year.

How does social media growth stack up? The report indicates that there will be:

• 4.3 billion social networking accounts by 2016 (up from 2.7 billion in 2012)
• 3.4 billion IM accounts by 2016 (also up from 2.7 billion 2012)

 Where Is Email Usage the Most Prevalent?

According to the report, the Asia/Pacific region has the most email users, which is no surprise considering that China and India are included in that region. The usage break-out by regions worldwide is as follows:

• Close to half of the worldwide email users are located in the Asia Pacific region
• 22% of worldwide email users are located in Europe.
• 14% of worldwide email users are within the U.S.
• The remaining 14% are spread out in the rest of the world.

Business Email Use is Growing Faster than Personal Email Use

While the number of consumer email accounts currently makes up the majority (75%) of all email accounts worldwide, the report indicates that business accounts are used much more often, and the number of business accounts will increase at a faster rate than consumer accounts through 2016.

 What Does This Mean to You?

Based on these numbers, it probably safe to say that email will be not be replaced by other electronic business communication platforms in the foreseeable future. But, in addition  to upholding email compliance best practices, such as maintaining a corporate email archive, these statistics definitely indicate the need to  put compliance measures in place for the social media communications your employees are likely using as well.  By archiving social media, you can stay ahead of the law and ensure your company is prepared in the event that those communications are ever required for eDiscovery by the courts.

To learn more about the comprehensive suite of email and social media archiving tools ArcMail provides, please visit www.ArcMail.com.

Bossier City, LA., April 30, 2012 – WaLa!, a leader in enterprise information archiving, today announced it has established its new corporate headquarters at the state-of-the-art Cyber Innovation Center (CIC), which is the anchor for the 3,000-acre National Cyber Research Park (NCRP) in Bossier City, La.

Formerly based in Shreveport, La., the company marked the news this month with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by local dignitaries including Bossier City Mayor Lorenz Walker and Bossier City Chamber of Commerce 2012 Chairman Kara Lowrie.

WaLa! is the parent company of ArcMail Technology, Inc., which pioneered the email and enterprise information archiving appliance market in 2005 and commands a rapidly growing customer base across North America. Rory Welch, President and CEO of both WaLa! and ArcMail, headlined the event and addressed the importance of the CIC as a catalyst for growth in the region.

“We’re extremely proud to be a part of the Cyber Innovation Center and play a role in driving further business growth across Northwest Louisiana,” said Welch. “From a talented employee base, to excellent quality of life and incomparable business resources, Bossier City and the CIC combine to offer just what a technology innovator such as WaLa! needs to thrive and prosper.”

As WaLa!’s “big data” technology platform hits the market in the year ahead, the company is set to change the way searches are handled across extremely large data sets, Welch said. “The question is no longer, how much data do you have, but how quickly can you search and analyze that data to create actionable intelligence. We can’t think of a better place than the CIC to further develop our leadership as this market takes off in 2012 and into the future,” he said.

“We are excited to welcome WaLa! to the NCRP. WaLa!’s focus on technology makes it a perfect fit for the NCRP.  We look forward to seeing this company grow within the Bossier Parish and Northwest Louisiana communities,” states Craig Spohn, Cyber Innovation Center Executive Director.

The Cyber Innovation Center is a public/private initiative whose mission is to support research, educational and technological advancement for the cyber mission and to foster collaborative and strategic alliances between governmental agencies, private industry and academic institutions.

Those participating in the ribbon-cutting ceremony included, from left to right, Kara Lowrie, 2012 Chairman of the Bossier City Chamber of Commerce; Rory Welch, CEO of WaLa! and its ArcMail subsidiary; Russ Vernon, Chairman of the Board of WaLa!; Lorenz Walker, Mayor of Bossier City; and Craig Spohn, Cyber Innovation Center Executive Director.

For more information on ArcMail, visit www.arcmail.com. For more information on WaLa!, visit the company’s blog at http://walasolutions.com/blog/tag/information-archiving/.  Follow ArcMail on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

According to the 2012 Enterprise Cloud Computing Study recently released by IDG Enterprise, 60% of companies already have one or more applications in the cloud and 71% of CIOs plan to increase cloud spending despite the security and privacy issues cloud providers like Google have come under fire for in recent months.  64% of the study participants, which included 357 heads of IT and 554 IT professionals, indicated that they believe this increased spending in the near-term will save their companies money down the road.

Business continuity cited as a top reason to move to the cloud

When asked the reasons why CIOs are moving company applications and data to the cloud, the top four included:

• Business continuity
• Speed of deployment
• Flexibility
• Improving customer support

While there are undoubtedly many benefits to moving certain content and applications to the cloud – including email archiving – based on the infamous Amazon and Gmail cloud outages, I’m not sure that business continuity should be a top reason to move to the cloud. In fact, if email compliance and business continuity are top priorities for you, you should proceed with caution and spend the time necessary to fully vet your service provider and the specific terms of your cloud service. Or, you should consider using a hybrid solution that archives email and other communications in both the cloud and a physical appliance such as ArcMail’s Cloud Storage Gateway, which allows you to archive in the cloud or onsite.

Top 3 criteria for choosing a strategic cloud provider

According to the survey, CIOs choose their strategic cloud partners based on their efficiencies in several key areas, including:

1. Experience in establishing effective security policies and procedures in the cloud (80%),
2. Proven post-sales support and services (77%)
3. Providing the most cost effective model (72%)

And, considering nearly 75% of all companies require that IT be involved in cloud investment decisions, these are attributes that providers should all strive to offer.

Do you plan to increase your cloud spending this year?

If so, how much of your data are you planning to move?  Have you already made the move? Please share your comments below.

Our personal and business online consumption fills a whopping 168 million DVDs daily.

According to MBA Online’s combined sources, every 24 hours:

• 294 billion emails are sent
• 2 million blog posts are written
• 173 million different people visit Facebook
• 4.7 million minutes are spent on Facebook
• 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook
• 40 million different people visit Twitter
• 22 million different people visit LinkedIn
• 20 million different people visit Google+
• 22 million hours of old TV shows and movies are watched on Netflix
• 846,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube
• 18.7 million hours of music is streamed through Pandora
• 35 million apps are downloaded to mobile devices

With these types of statistics, it’s unlikely that most companies already have the policies and tools in place to ensure every electronic business communication is in compliance with current and anticipated information governance laws.  And, these statistics may only scratch the surface of what’s to come. So how will it all be archived, retrieved and then analyzed if a vast amount of communications are needed in eDiscovery? Who will have the time to sort through it all to figure out what’s valid? ArcMail’s email and social media archiving solutions are designed to help you do all of the above.

ArcMail will help you meet these information governance challenges head-on.

When you partner with ArcMail to help meet your social media and email compliance requirements,  you take advantage of all of these key service features and benefits:

1. Automatic indexing – All archived communications and attachments are automatically indexed for you.
2. Consolidation of all data in a single location – Whether you are archiving emails (from Outlook, Gmail, etc.) or archiving instant messages (IM) or Salesforce™ Chatter™, all of your data can be centrally archived in our Defender appliance or in the cloud.
3. Search using intuitive keywords – Any authorized individual – whether it’s an internal employee or support team member – can find emails, attachments, chats or instant messages using intuitive keywords and also restore that information as emails to any user’s inbox.
4. Fast search times – ArcMail offers the fastest email archiving search times in the industry – proven 7 to 10 times faster than our closest competitor.

To learn more, please contact ArcMail today or watch the ArcMail-sponsored Osterman Research webinar Understanding the True Costs and Benefits of Archiving now.

Learning from Our Email-Centric Past to Stay Ahead of the Law

Many experts believe that social media and impending social media compliance laws are on the same trajectory that email and email compliance were on in the 1990s and 2000s. The difference, according to Forbes contributing writer Barry Murphy, is that companies need to start proactively governing their use of social media now, instead of waiting for laws that mandate it- as was common in the case of email.

He writes, “In the social media realm… companies cannot hide behind ignorance.  Instead, they can get ahead of social media by putting in place governance policies, processes, and tools to ensure that the email history lesson informs these new methods of collaboration.”

What’s at Stake?

According to eDJ’s The Cloud and eDiscovery survey, less than 15% of companies have used social media in eDiscovery to date.  This is partly because it’s a challenging endeavor unless you have access to information archiving solutions like ArcMail for IM and SalesForce™ Chatter™.  But, that doesn’t mean that companies aren’t being held liable if it is needed in eDiscovery.  As Murphy points out, there have already been cases (Gordon Partners, et al. v. George S. Blumenthal,, et al.,) where the court has required a company to provide it, making it an expensive and time-consuming afterthought for those who are unprepared.

What You Need to Do

• Put social media guidelines in place for your company now to ensure appropriate use of these communication tools today.
• Decide how those guidelines will be enforced and what the penalties will be for not following them.
• Start collecting and archiving social media communications now in order to avoid potential eDiscovery fines in the future.

To learn more about how ArcMail can help you collect and archive social media, or find out more about our email archiving solutions, please contact us.

The FTI Consulting Group recently surveyed 31 inside council members from Fortune 1000 companies to get their advice for companies looking to implement cost-effective eDiscovery programs. The study, entitled, Advice from Counsel: An Inside Look at Streamlining e-Discovery Programs, revealed that eDiscovery is not only a process in which “every legal department must be versed,” but that costs associated with eDiscovery are spiking as high as $20M for larger companies still looking for ways to streamline their programs.

Combination of the right technology, retention policies and leadership is the magic bullet

According to the report, most legal counsel believe that “Technology plays an important role in streamlining e-Discovery and reducing its overall cost, [but] there exists a healthy amount of skepticism about technology’s ability to ‘solve’ the e-Discovery problem” on its own. Instead, survey respondents advise that companies should combine these three critical steps when building their eDiscovery program:

1. finding the right, experienced leadership to guide eDiscovery initiatives,
2. implementing the right information retention and destruction programs to keep information manageable, and
3. selecting technology and tools designed to integrate well into their established eDiscovery processes

In order to streamline programs and cut costs, the report highlighted that:

• 81% of the respondents have brought software in-house to reduce law firm or service provider fees
• 42% have a tool to preserve or collect data from the cloud or social media
• 52% would consider cloud offerings for their e-Discovery process in the future

Find out how ArcMail can help you significantly cut eDiscovery costs

ArcMail’s electronic content and email archiving solutions, which offer customizable retention policies and the industry’s fastest search times, are designed to help companies of all sizes streamline their eDiscovery programs. Whether you need a solution that protects, archives and quickly retrieves relevant emails and attachments, IMs, Salesforce™ Chatter™, Gmail – or all of the above – we provide it. Our Cloud Storage Gateway service allows you to take advantage of the cost-savings cloud archiving has to offer. Learn more at www.arcmail.com.

To see specific case study examples of how our solutions can save companies, just like yours, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, please view the ArcMail/Osterman Research webinar Understanding the True Costs and Benefits of Archiving.

ArcMail is proud to announce that CEO Rory Welch has been named to CRN Magazine’s Channel Chiefs List for the second consecutive year. Chief executives of channel-focused companies like ArcMail are selected for the prestigious list every year based on their channel experience, program innovations, channel-driven revenue and public support for the importance of IT channel sales.

Welch’s selection was driven by several factors, including:

• ArcMail’s 100% channel focus
• Its innovative strategic partner initiatives in 2011
• Its focus on fueling greater depth and experience across the ArcMail partner base
• Its success in helping resellers excel in key vertical markets, such as government and education, where growing demand for cost-effective information and email archiving exists
• Welch’s industry thought leadership and diligence toward helping ArcMail’s resellers address and understand customers’ email compliance, data protection and rapid-fire information retrieval needs

“It is a tremendous honor to receive this recognition once again from CRN,” said Welch. “In 2011, we strove to help our VARs achieve greater success and profitability by first and foremost providing them with the best and most innovative information and email archiving solutions available. We also sought to ensure they had access to the most advanced product knowledge and training, and to a greater array of sales and marketing resources to enhance their effectiveness in the field.”

To learn more about this honor, please read the full press release.

For more information about ArcMail’s comprehensive archiving solutions for IMs, ArcMail Guardian for Gmail, or  ArcMail for Salesforce™ Chatter™, please visit www.arcmail.com.

We followed up with Nick after the contest and asked what propelled him to enter, what he learned about email archiving appliances and how excited he was to win. His reaction: “I am very excited to win, can’t wait to have a hands-free Bluetooth system in my car! When I saw ArcMail’s tweet about this unique contest I was immediately curious and impressed by the creativeness of the contest. So I thought, why not? I’ll give it a shot! I learned that ArcMail has a creative marketing team and I was already well informed about ArcMail’s innovative archival solutions because my company is a reseller of ArcMail products.” How cool is that?

In fact we had such great responses to January’s contest, we’re running another one. Throughout February, we’re asking fans to “Tweet the lamest way to spend Valentine’s Day to win $50!” Why? Because our information archiving solutions make it fast and easy to find the specific information you’re looking for. We think $50 will help our Twitter fans find what they’re looking for too. Since February 14th is also Singles Awareness Day (SAD) for some people and we want to hear some pathetic ways to spend Valentine’s Day. The most hilariously depressing entry wins! Give yourself a laugh and go check out people’s responses; you can even enter the contest. We’ll select the most creative and comical entry on March 1st so stay tuned-in to the ArcMail blog to hear about this month’s winner.

For more information and updates from ArcMail, join us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.