BIOS: Technology Means Business

Cobweb Solutions and ZANTAZ are set to offer a long-term e-mail management and storage solution partnership designed to help small and medium sized businesses reduce the cost and IT headache of managing and archiving large volumes of e-mail.

Cobweb Solutions and ZANTAZ have formed a partnership to provide the first fully integrated managed e-mail archival service for Microsoft Hosted Exchange customers.

Today, organisations send more information electronically than ever before and as a result face a dilemma about managing and storing this ever increasing volume of information, which is often in the form of e-mail.

The challenges posed by these increasing information volumes are compounded by the growth in industry regulation and corporate governance guidelines which often require the long term retention and easy retrieval of such electronic data.

E-mail is now the preferred medium for transacting business and has become a repository for all kinds of business information, including contracts and agreements, price estimates and negotiations. The storage of emails must therefore be in accordance with industry and corporate governance legislation.

These include the Data Protection Act, which relates to data about staff and customers, Basel II and FSA regulations in the finance industry, and the Companies Bill, which affects any company that has to appoint auditors.

In addition to compliance, key internal drivers, such as migration of Exchange servers and the need to have easy access to e-mail, have driven demand for e-mail archiving. According to The Radicati Group’s European Compliance and Email Archiving Market, 2005 to 2009 report, the region’s e-mail archiving installed base is set to increase from 7 million to 90 million seats in the next four years.

The Managed Email Archival service automatically applies a corporate policy, based on parameters such as age, size, status and location, to move email messages into a searchable archive. This service offers organisations a secure and scalable solution to the challenges they face in e-mail management; significantly reducing storage costs as email is moved from the Microsoft Exchange Server to an Archive Store, providing a secure long-term email storage solution that delivers a foundation for regulatory and legal compliance and enhanced knowledge management and productivity through the creation of an automated centralised archive store.

Michael Frisby, Business Development Director at Cobweb Solutions comments, “Our Managed Email Archival service, which fully integrates with our award winning Managed Business Email service, based on Microsoft Exchange, addresses the two core challenges facing companies today of managing the ever increasing volume of email and the growth in related regulation and legislation. Our partnership with ZANTAZ means we are able to leverage their expertise in e-mail archival to help our customers store, search and retrieve their email.

“As an ISO27001 Certified organisation, Cobweb believes that the ZANTAZ EAS solution will give our customers complete peace of mind that their data is being professionally managed with security as the first priority. This expansion of our Managed Services portfolio is in keeping with our objective to provide low-cost, robust and scalable, fully managed solutions to small and medium businesses.”

Steve Reny, senior vice president of Corporate Development, ZANTAZ adds, “Cobweb Solutions, a recognised market leader in the delivery of high class managed services to small and medium business, is the first Managed Services Provider to bring our enterprise class e-mail archive solution to this broader market. Our combined offering will provide joint customers with a fully managed, centralised archive facility that meets all of their e-mail management needs, now and in the future, for a low, predictable monthly fee.”

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