Posted by: Aseem Asthana, Matt Herbert, and Kevin Sheu
At Barracuda Networks, we speak with organizations on a daily basis, and have discovered a group of frustrated users. Their companies are glued to an archiving solution because data cannot be ported. Stories like this serve as a cautionary tale when selecting an email archiving solution.
For these companies, emails are archived by competing products in a proprietary format, which makes it unusable outside of the archives. Exporting indirectly via PSTs can take several months, depending on the size of the archives. This not only makes it difficult to gather data for operational use, but makes it difficult to archive to a different solution at a later time. This is a great business model for many companies: sticky customers who can’t leave. Even if technical support or product quality degrades, there is no real option for recourse.
To further the point, companies undergoing corporate changes often leave customers with few options. As examples, we often speak with Mimosa Nearpoint and EMC EmailXtender customers who have few solutions for migrating data. In many cases, they are forced to take a data migration path that spans several months before a new archive is operational.
Please be careful when selecting your archiving solution. We highly recommend that you consider your data flexibility as part of your criteria.
The Barracuda Message Archiver ensures that you have that flexibility. Emails are exported in native standards-based format and can easily be exported for future use without the use of PSTs. For questions about the Barracuda Message Archiver, please visit http://www.barracuda.com/archiver or call Barracuda Networks for a free 30-day evaluation at 1-888-ANTI-SPAM or +1 (408) 342-5400.
Tags: data portability, PST files
