With effect from August 18th, ComStat is providing 100GB inline email archiving. Inline archiving is provided in addition to the 50GB limits established for individual user accounts.
Inline archiving is a technique that relocates arhived email from on-premises equipment to users’ allocated services at the data centre.
Typically, small business users archive email using Microsoft Outlook to a segragated data file that sits apart from their Outlook inbox, sent Items, and other current folders. Archiving helps to improve system runtime. However, archived emails continue to reside on users’ individual workstations, and archives can only be accessed from the workstation that the arhive is situated on. This leaves the risk of data loss in the event of hard drive failure or machine failure. Unless the archive itself has been backed up using .pst, the archive remains vulnerable.
In our experience, users are not comfortable with Outlook’s backup functions and email backup, whether by copying current folders or using archives, is generally not organised. Typically, users’ email records are usually about as historic as the lifetime of their machine.
ComStat’s email services for premium business users provides 50GB mail storage per user. There is a case to argue that archiving is not necessary at this level. However, users who connect to email services with mobile devices via telco connections may have trouble managing large volumes of email on mobiles, particularly where bandwidth is limited, where data transfer volumes may be an issue, and where smartphones are physically limited to lower capacities (8GB, 16GB, etc).
Inline archiving helps to reduce inbox sizes, while relocating historic archives to the managed data centre also means users can access their archive via a variety of devices.
Inline archiving is available to premium business users by default. Other users considering this service should talk through options with ComStat. Existing users who want to upgrade to this service would need a manual rebuild of their environment, so it is important to plan needs in advance of execution of service.