Email is the lifeblood of modern business, and within it, courses the conversations and contracts that constitute intellectual property. By some estimates, as much as 90% of the intellectual property of an enterprise moves, at one time or another, through email. Preserving intellectual property is the proverbial ‘no brainer’ – this information is the culmination of many hours of effort and represents potential competitive advantage.
When companies reconsider email as intellectual property, preserving it just makes good sense. The value of protecting it becomes clear, and a secure, scalable platform like the cloud makes the decision to start archiving email even easier. You might ask “But isn’t that what backups are for?” Sort of. Backups do seek to preserve important data, but by locking these files away on backup tapes or drives, they become more difficult to access, to search, and therefore to make actionable. Backing files up is great, but a backup that you can’t access 24/7/365 from anywhere in the world is something less than a cloud archive, and why settle for less?
A Sonian cloud archive will let you search on keywords and metadata – not just throughout an email message, but also within more than 500 different attachments file types. Backups are great when you know what you’re looking for, and not much help when you don’t. Cloud archives enable you to create a single search across multiple databases, scanning millions of documents in seconds.
The realization that email is not merely a communications commodity but the most valuble of data is driving more organizations to make data preservation a top priority. Sure, there are elements of old-fashioned CYA – the very real comfort knowing important data is preserved offsite for when you need it most. Costly litigation is usually preceded by a “discovery process”, in which companies need to produce all relevant documents between employees (who may no longer work there) and customers or partners. This process can be painstaking (or impossible) for companies not employing a sophisticated cloud-based archiving product.
Even absent impending litigation, companies may want to speed audit response or to quickly conduct internal investigations (are these employees having an inappropriate relationship? Is someone sharing our intellectual property with external parties?). You’ll need a sophisticated lens to delve into the dataset, derive meaning from the data, and enable you to decide faster.
Data preservation makes business sense. Cloud economics make it more affordable than ever. Sonian has helped more than 12,000 customers in 40 countries moves more than 8 Billion objects into the cloud and make them immediately discoverable with our fast and accurate search. Get beyond backup and turn your “dark data” into actionable intelligence today.
