By Charlene O'Hanlon

Cloud-based e-mail security vendor Proofpoint has announced a major upgrade to its Enterprise Archive solution to include support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange as well as expanded eDiscovery functionality.

The newest Proofpoint Enterprise Archive now has full support for Microsoft Exchange Server 10, including support for Microsoft Outlook Web Access and access to both stubbed attachments and advanced search capabilities. In addition, the new version supports mixed environments that use more than one version of Microsoft Exchange Server.

Proofpoint Enterprise Archive also has a slew of new eDiscovery features, including automatic preservation of data in active legal holds; near real-time eDiscovery search; the ability for end users to do complex searches of their own archived e-mail; random sampling of supervised e-mail inboxes for auditing purposes; and enhanced supervision workflow to easily manage multiple supervision queues.

Proofpoints Enterprise Archive is one of a handful of on-demand, e-mail archiving solutions available via a SaaS model. It combines storage and search in the cloud with an on-premises appliance, creating a hybrid solution that offers flexibility, security and cost-savings, said Andres Kohn, vice president of product technology and management at Proofpoint. And because it is a mixed solution using both cloud and premises technology, the channel may find it an easier sell than straight cloud-based solutions, he said.

One of the chief concerns at many companies looking at cloud computing is security and it should be,” Kohn said. They want to make sure their data is secure. Our solution comes with an encryption key that only the customer has, so they know their data is secure.”

E-mail archiving is becoming an integral part of the corporate infrastructure in an effort to comply with strict regulatory compliance rules and ward off potential litigation. As such, Proofpoints solution is a good fit for resellers looking to offer a more complete cloud-based technology offering.

More companies need to have an archiving and retention policy, and those resellers who are selling more cloud-based services need to be able to sell technology to help those companies,” Kohn said. Channel partners getting better versed at putting together an entire solution.”

Pricing for Proofpoint Enterprise Archive, which is available now, starts at $30 per person, including 24×7 support as well as all the required storage infrastructure.