ComArchive: E-mail Archiving Meets Amazon's Cloud

Amazon Web Services, proprietors of the EC2 cloud, has entered into a partnership with relatively unknown Danish firm ComArchive to provide e-mail archiving in the cloud. The alleged selling point: The solution can be installed, configured, and made ready to go in 10 minutes, ComArchive asserts. Now, for the key questions facing VARs and customers.

The first big question is: are corporate customers willing to move email data to a cloud like Amazon EC2? Putting aside the privacy issues for the moment, there are compliance issues to contemplate. Many corporations, especially the larger ones, balk at having any data, let alone something as sensitive as official e-mails, on a a server administrated by someone not on their payroll.

Secondly, we come back to privacy: how many VARs are comfortable advising their clients to hand over their data to strangers? No security is unbeatable, but there might be a certain peace of mind from having an on-site solution that you implemented yourself. Again, e-mails are no laughing matter when it comes to sensitivity.

Finally, is it worth the trouble of migrating from existing solutions? Many VARs prefer to work with established data protection brands like Iron Mountain.

Moving Toward the Cloud?

Still, more and more data protection companies are plugging into Amazon’s cloud. A few examples:

Back at ComArchive, the company claims to protect e-mails for more than 30,000 people every day. And yes, ComArchive has a channel partner program. Next up, we’ll be watching to see how many VARs and customers join ComArchive in Amazon’s cloud. Let us know if you’ll be making similar moves…

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