It is Vital to Reduce Your Company’s Data Footprint

You may be trying to reduce your company’s carbon footprint, but what efforts have you made to reduce your company’s data footprint?

If your company is attacked and hackers gain control of your servers, they will not be able to gain access to data that are not stored on your systems. If you use cloud archiving, you can migrate old data that you are not legally permitted to delete and keep your company information safe and secure. It is possible to reduce your company’s data footprint without incurring major expenses.

Use the cloud to reduce your company’s data footprint

The cloud offers many advantages to companies. It is not just a matter of protecting data from attack. Data need to be stored somewhere and the hardware required is expensive. Space must be dedicated to storage, which could be much better purposed. A server room doesn’t make most companyies any money. An extra telemarketing operation based in the same space would. It would arguably expose the company to less risk.

The huge cost of data storage can be avoided

Data storage requires hardware, and that hardware costs a lot of money to purchase, keep supplied with power, and kept cool. Hardware can also malfunction spontaneously, or as a result of power spikes and cooling issues. It is no surprise that the cloud has proved so popular. It eliminates the cost of purchasing and maintaining rooms of computer equipment.

Amazon realized this and started its Amazon AWS business. Small businesses especially would benefit, as they would not need to buy expensive hardware. Large companies could make huge savings, reducing staff costs as well as equipment costs.

Cloud services benefit all

There were a number of things that all came together to allow Amazon AWS – and cloud computing in general – to be offered to businesses. Virtualization was critical, as were Microsoft Hypervisor and VMware. Companies such as Amazon were able to use a single server to run multiple systems and to divide those among its customers. Standardization resulted in data being transferred to the cloud. After all, it didn’t make sense to have a separate device for every function and, if those devices could be housed in a huge data center with the cost covered by someone else, that made a lot of sense.

Of course, it is not just the cost of the equipment and the running cost that can be saved. Computers require software and software is licensed. Every license adds to the cost. For cloud service providers it makes sense, as they can get a lower license cost by buying hundreds or thousands of licenses. The same goes for equipment purchases. Amazon AWS gets a much better price on its tens of thousands of computers than a company that only requires one.

Staff costs are reduced because one dedicated individual can service many hundreds of servers. They can also be given tools to do this to reduce the time it takes. This is not an option for SMBs.

Is it possible to reduce your company’s data footprint and stay secure?

Unfortunately, no data protections are 100% secure. If you want to reduce your company’s data footprint, you will not reduce your level of risk to zero. It doesn’t matter where data are located, there will be a possibility that the data can be accessed. The aim is to maximize security and reduce risk as far as possible, but you will never get that risk down to 0%.

Cloud storage however is likely to be as close to 0% as you are likely to get as a small business owner. The protections put in place to secure cloud data are considerable. Cloud service providers must ensure their customers’ data are protected, because a data breach could potentially destroy all faith in their business. As a result, highly sophisticated multi-layered security defenses are used. The data are protected by teams of personnel, 24/7. The resources available to cloud service providers are many orders of magnitude greater than those available to a SME. In short, the cloud will give you the best security you are likely to be able to get.

Cloud archiving and backups also ensure that state and federal regulations are satisfied. SOX and HIPAA require data to be backed up and stored off site. Those backups must also be secured. If data is encrypted and stored in the cloud, even if a security breach does occur, the data will not be accessible by the hacker. Use a cloud service provider that encrypts data at rest and in motion, and you will have the best security you can get. You will just need to make sure your encryption keys are not stolen.

Backup your data but maintain an email archive for GDPR compliance

With your data backed up and secured in the cloud you will be protected against data loss, but what about accessing your data? With a backup you will be limited. If you need to access certain files, or search for data elements, you will need an email archive. An email archive is a store of data that you can use whenever you need to. You can recover or access email data as and when required without having to restore everything as you would need to do if you only had a backup.

An email archive will certainly be of benefit to companies that retain EU citizens´ personal data on email. Following the enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), EU citizens now have the right to request access to personal information, correct or complete it where necessary, and delete it (the “right to be forgotten”) when there is justifiable cause. Companies that rely solely on backed up data may face a logistical nightmare to respond to data access requests within the thirty days allowed.

Furthermore, a cloud-based email archiving solution is more likely to protect data from loss, theft or unauthorized disclosure as required by GDPR. With audit logs and real-time monitoring, companies will be able demonstrate their efforts to comply with the EU regulations – a mitigating factor should a data breach occur.

ArcTitan – The convenient and cost-effective email archiving solution

You may want to reduce your company’s data footprint, but some data needs to be accessed and searched often. Email for example. You can create a backup of your PST files, but restoring them means restoring the whole email account and that can take hours. On top of that, all mail items will be restored, even those that are no longer required.

An email archive is the logical solution. Individual emails can be accessed and restored when needed. If you ever need to access files stored in an email account, or access old emails, you can with an email archive: Quickly and easily. The archive is tamper-proof, ensuring a permanent copy of each original email is retained – Something that is essential for compliance and to meet eDiscovery requirements.

ArcTitan allows data from Google Docs, Office 365, MS Exchange, Zimbra and Lotus to be restored, as well as individual emails. Searches can be performed to find the required email or document. Plain text queries can be made from a desktop, laptop, mobile phone or tablet. The data does not need to be retrieved first, as the search can be performed and then the individual file or email accessed.

All emails stored securely on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3 and are automatically backed up. ArcTitan features single instance storage, which means that only one copy of of the email is stored. This is achieved through de-duplication of messages. Not only does this reduce storage space, it means searches are much faster. When you search, instead of returning multiple copies of the same email, your list will only include unique emails, which makes finding the email you need much faster. How fast? You can search up to 30 million emails a second, and emails are automatically sent to the archive at a rate of around 200 a second.

Move your data to the cloud and you can lower your operational costs, improve data security, and access your data whenever you need to. You can reduce your data footprint without violating state and federal regulations, and still maintain access. Store your backed up data in an encrypted file in the cloud, and maintain access to your old emails by creating an email archive in the cloud.

Some of the Main Features of ArcTitan

  • Scalable, email archiving that grows with your business
  • Email data stored securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3
  • Lightning fast searches – Search 30 million emails a second
  • Rapid archiving at up to 200 emails a second
  • Automatic backups of the archive
  • Email archiving with no impact on network performance
  • Ensure an exact, tamperproof copy of all emails is retained
  • Easy data retrieval for eDiscovery
  • Protection for email from cyberattacks
  • Eliminate PSTs and other security risks
  • Facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access
  • Only pay for active users
  • Slashes the time and cost of eDiscovery other formal searches
  • Seamless integration with Outlook
  • Supports single sign-on
  • Save and combine searches
  • Perform multiple searches simultaneously
  • Limits IT department involvement in finding lost email – users can access their own archived email
  • Compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc.