If you’re in the IT space, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, odds are you’ve heard about cloud computing. In fact, you’re probably hearing about applications “in the cloud” now more than ever – accompanied by much debate and controversy.
But what is cloud computing and how is it valuable for email archiving?
What is cloud computing?
According to Gartner’s Key Issues for Cloud Computing (2009), cloud computing is “a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using Internet technologies.”
This broad definition is the reason why the umbrella of cloud computing is so huge; it’s a scalable technology than can be applied to virtually anything. In fact, it is being applied to virtually anything. There almost too many types of public cloud computing to keep up with, including:
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Platform as a service (PaaS)
- Software as a service (SaaS)
- Storage as a service (STaaS)
- Security as a service (SECaaS)
- Data as a service (DaaS)
- Business process as a service (BPaaS)
- Test environment as a service (TEaaS)
- Desktop as a service (DaaS)
- API as a service (APIaaS)
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all these titles, but simply put, they are IT services on demand making it easier to scale the amount of IT resources used.
How is cloud computing used for email archiving?
The value of cloud computing for email archiving is based on the fact that it means users don’t have to be concerned with the amount of storage required and they have enough compute power available to search quickly through all their records.
For us scaling of cloud storage is as easy as asking Amazon Web Services on the fly for more storage through their Simple Storage Service (S3). The amount of compute power required scales with the amount of emails that is being received. If we ever need more storage or compute it is just about asking.
Security in the cloud
The main concern related to cloud computing is security, because users have to trust remote services with their data, software, and computation.
However, cloud providers are dedicated to protecting their customers’ data, because it’s so integral to their business. At SAVE IT we do this by being backed by Amazon’s 11 9’s of data resiliency, ensuring every stored email and file is AES-256 bit encrypted and guaranteed 99.99% SLA, and not co-mingling customer’s data.
In conclusion, the benefit of cloud computing for email archiving is scaling in real-time, as it takes advantage of:
- the elasticity of cloud CPU compute power
- the ability to bring up new cloud nodes on demand at a moment’s notice
- the ability to turn off those nodes when that activity’s finished in order to lower the cost and offer a positive experience for the customer
To learn more about cloud-based email archiving, please download the full whitepaper:
