Dan's Take

Using Azure Services for Archival Storage

Microsoft Office backup in the Microsoft cloud.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 06/29/2016

The folks at Archive360 introduced me to the company, its Archive2Anywhere Platform, and Archive2Azure, the newest member of the company's portfolio.

The overall goal is helping organizations deal with the cost and requirements for archival storage of Microsoft Office documents, messages, spreadsheets and so on.  This can present a big challenge for enterprises in regulated industries and those facing demands for documents as part of an eDiscovery request related to litigation. Archive2Azure is designed to help organizations move information into and out of Azure cloud storage efficiently, and to search through that data when needed.

What Is Achive2Anywhere?
Archive360 offers connectors allowing its platform to move data into and out of a number of third-party storage platforms, including:

• Autonomy EAS
• EMC EmailXtender
• EMC SourceOne
• Mimosa NearPoint
• Veritas Enterprise Vault
• Veritas EV.cloud

In 2016, Archive360 added the following platforms:

• Dell MessageOne
• AXS-One (both EML and Lotus Notes)
• MX Logic
• ArchiveOne/C2C
• Gwava

Introducing Archive2Azure
Archieve360 believes that Archive2Azure is the first regulatory compliance storage solution based on the Microsoft Azure Platform. This tool makes it possible for enterprises that have adopted Office360 to use Azure for:

• Long-term, low-cost, and secure retention of data for compliance; scalability is limited only by the enterprise's budget
• Infinite scalability, also limited only by budgets
• Offsite, enterprise grade security and disaster recovery
• Long-term retention designed for “grey data” (low-touch, inactive and legal data)
• Archive journal data
• Potentially responsive and legal hold data; defensible migration
• Knowledge worker unstructured data; desktops, file shares & cloud

The company's portfolio also provides tools to help enterprises quickly search through archived data to 1) address discovery requests, and 2) determine what data can be migrated to very low cost, offline storage.

Dan's Take: Gray Data Can Creep Up On You
The folks at Archive360 describe the company as a "moving company." They help companies move themselves into Microsoft's Office360 by gathering up information from Exchange, SharePoint and individual PST files, storing that data in a unified file and making it possible to analyze that data.

We had an interesting conversation about the challenges enterprises face in dealing with what the Archive360 folks call "gray data:" non-structured data stored in email messages, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Enterprises typically invest a great deal of money in storage for this type of data, and often don't really know what's in that huge and ever-growing data store.

While I found the discussion interesting, I've seen many presentations that discussed using other cloud storage services for the same or similar purposes.

I do agree with Archieve360, however, that enterprises are increasingly going to see that data as part of their data assets, and will want to include it in their Big Data projects.

Are you using Office360? If so, it would be wise to get to know Archieve360 and their products.