Astaro Offers E-mail Archiving in the Cloud

Astaro Corporation announced that Astaro Mail Archiving, an e-mail archiving service hosted in the cloud, is now available. The Astaro Mail Archiving service provides companies using Microsoft Exchange unlimited e-mail storage for an indefinite amount of time for only a small fee per month and user, without any additional costs. The Astaro mail archive is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Outlook and offers its users intuitive and easy access to their archived e-mails.

"Since starting with Astaro Mail Archiving, I am no longer required to manually archive e-mails on an external hard drive. This frees up storage space and saves me about 6 hours a week," said Raymond Morrison, Network Administrator at Billerica Public Schools. "Unlimited storage space and retention time means that I need to worry about less. I am also really impressed by the fast search feature and the Outlook plug-in for end-users."

Since e-mail today is seen to be on par with printed business letters, most countries have passed laws that make archiving e-mail obligatory. Traditional archiving products can be deployed either as software on a company’s exchange server or as dedicated hardware appliances. Both options are complex, expensive and require additional expenditures for maintenance and upgrades. Additionally, they are limited by hardware performance, and they cause scalability challenges. As the Astaro Mail Archiving service is hosted in the cloud, it can store unlimited e-mail messages and attachments. Astaro’s first hosted solution also includes 4-eye e-mail discovery and audit logging capabilities, allowing organizations to easily comply with local regulations.

"Compliance is one important reason to archive e-mails, but there is more," said Gert Hansen, Vice President Product Management at Astaro. "The real charm of an intelligent archiving solution, apart from being compliant, is that you can delete every e-mail without worrying about needing the information in the future. Because every e-mail will be easily retrievable even after you deleted it from your inbox, just by doing a quick search."

As employees get used to deleting e-mails which are no longer needed, fewer e-mails need to be stored on the internal server, which leads to drastically shortened back-up times and maintenance efforts. Additionally, the elimination of software or hardware for archiving purposes also means Astaro’s service requires no administration or maintenance on the part of the end-user or IT staff. To access their archived e-mails, users can use a quick ‘Google-like’ search, either via web interface or Outlook plug-in.

Hansen continued: "Our goal with the Astaro Mail Archiving service was to take the burden of archiving e-mails off of IT administrators. They no longer have to worry about storage space or software updates – we do it for them, so they can focus on more productive tasks. Developing a cloud-based storage service that automatically stores messages was the most effective way to achieve this goal."