Growing demand for e-mail storage and backup solutions has seen Business Connexion, formerly Comparex Africa, sign a partnership agreement with e-mail archiving specialist, Soarsoft Africa, distributor of ZANTAZ Exchange Archive Solution (EAS).
"Knowledge management within the enterprise has become a critical compliance issue particularly in light of the ECT (Electronic Communications and Transactions) Act," says Rodney Hood, managing executive of Business Connexion`s Enterprise Application Solutions Competency.
The key implication of the ECT Act is legal certainty of electronic documents and companies need to treat and retain e-mail in the same way as any written communications, which, in many cases, can be five years or more.
"This places a huge onus on companies to update their policies to include electronically stored data, particularly e-mail and unstructured data such as word processing documents and their various versions, as they are sent between business partners, auditors and clients."
"The problem for these companies is that Mail Messaging systems were never designed to store the vast quantities of information they now hold. As a result most e-mail is stored on insecure, inefficient local hard drives as .PST files. The information within the .PST files is often lost, stolen or simply destroyed by user negligence and makes it very difficult for the corporate to maintain, manage and comply with document storage needs," says Hood.
Based on these legal, business and technical requirements, Business Connexion chose to partner with Soarsoft, the African distributor of Exchange Archive Solution (EAS), developed by Canadian and North American firm, ZANTAZ.
"EAS is easily the most solid e-mail archiving and retrieval technology because of its scaleability and flexibility," says Hood.
The EAS solution is an archive engine that enables companies to fully manage the lifecycle of their e-mail and to efficiently separate important historical information from junk mail. The tool ensures that e-mail records and files are automatically maintained and disposed of in accordance with the set business and legal retention requirements.
Storage requirements are significantly reduced through data compression and single instance storage (SIS), which eliminates duplicate items in the system using checksum algorithms. In most instances, storage requirements are reduced by as much as 80%, and the built-in checksum algorithms used to perform SIS also ensure tamper-proof storage of the information without reliance on the hardware. Archive retrieval is transparent to the clients and takes a matter of seconds, while restoring lost e-mail boxes is a simple task.
It is also highly scaleable and has been chosen after proof of concept for a government site of over 1 million users.
"E-mail constitutes evidence of corporate decisions and behaviour," says Chris Hathaway, COO of Soarsoft Africa.
"E-mail also contains valuable corporate knowledge that can be easily destroyed through hardware failures, virus attacks or user recklessness. Corporate e-mail is the core of the business` intellectual capital and its storage needs to be centralised and managed in compliance with regulations and business requirements.
"EAS is different from other archive solutions, because it offers unbeatable storage space reductions and low cost of ownership. It has exceptional archiving performance and a unique, open architecture that removes bottlenecks and increases service resilience.
"Business Connexion is one of the leading solutions providers to the corporate market and we are extremely pleased they have chosen us as one of their exclusive solutions partners. Business Connexion will also play a vital role in our strategy to expand into Africa," concludes Hathaway.
Business Connexion will also offer e-mail and file archiving as part of its overall outsourcing solution.
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