Self-powered Cloud Systems? Perhaps…

LiveOffice, a SaaS provider of email archiving, was bought recently by Symantec for $115 million. Not to be confused with Microsoft Live nor Microsoft Office, LiveOffice offers both cloud and on-premise email archiving. They have established themselves as a value-added service in managing the implementation from current provider to cloud provider by almost eliminating all risk of losing sensitive information during such processes.

This manageability and agility of LiveOffice also provides an unexpected bonus. Remember, the provide archiving to both on-premise and cloud environments. Let’s say you have a primary cloud-based e-mail hosting service, and are using LiveOffice to archive your e-mail. And as Amazon and a few others have experienced, you e-mail hosting services experiences a power outage. In most cases, that’s like being in a sail boat and suddenly and without warning finding yourself without a hint of wind anywhere — nothing can move, you’re dead in the water.

However, with LiveOffice, there’s a difference. If you are using LiveOffice, they keep all your e-mail configurations updated in their system in order to properly archive the messages and attachments — they do this whether you have elected an on-premise or cloud archive system. This means when your primary e-mail provider has lost power, LiveOffice can be your backup. Your company is still able to continue messaging and sending attachments until the primary provider has regained their power (LiveOffice can do this from the archive). Once your e-mail provider is back online, the emails between the last archive and the time of the power outage are moved to the archive — or can be made available for a while longer.

This places a whole new perspective on cloud systems. If the architecture is properly constructed, then archiving systems (or even backup systems) can become a parallel auxiliary system. That being the case, then the logistics that everyone will need to consider when hiring a cloud-based archive provider (that has a on-premise option as well), would be the same as any real estate – location, location, location. This would truly revolutionize the cloud systems into a more stable and trusted system when a power outage is experienced.

What are your thoughts? What do you see as a benefit of similar cloud services such as LiveOffice? What are other cloud services might be able to emulate the possibilities that LiveOffice provides? Let us know!

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