Enterprise Email Archiving in the Clouds
We had two speakers at the January 13, 2009 cloud user group meeting in Boston. The first speaker was from Sonian (yes - they chose a nickname from Smithsonian) was Greg Arnette their CTO. Sonain is a startup company that built a cloud based service offering to archive email to the cloud. The complete stack lives in the cloud and they use Ruby-on-rails and Erlang for their IDE.
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Started in 2006 http://www.sonian.net/
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They only have 10 employees and only needed $1M in angel funds because they claim they didn’t need the other $4M in technicians and infrastructure that startups traditionally used. This allows them to focus on their intellectual property and getting those key reference accounts before they even have to consider venture capital or other financial instruments (and give up the equity to go with it).
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They have 75 customers, 7 Vars signed, and 5 OEM agreements.
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The 75 customers range from 200 to 10,000 email boxes.
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Sonian runs on Amazon Web Services using EC2, SDB & MySQL, EBS and S3, SQS, UI is served via Apache (on AWS), and ERlang, RabbitMQ,, and Map Reduce for the ESB and processing.
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Their service supports all major email engines: Exchange, GroupWise, Notes, IMail Server, Zimbra, Scalix….
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$36/year/mailbox compared to standard offerings in the $120+/year/mailbox range. Each mailbox gets 2GB/User/year for that fee.
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All data is stored with an MD5 hash and encrypted and is fully searchable for eDiscovery.
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All data is replicated to 8 AWS datacenters for access and protection
Greg’s presentation was very interesting … and he got lots of questions from the crowd! Security and architecture were the hot topics as was how the service works - customer (email/system administrator) configures the policies for extracting and sending emails in a batch to Sonian Services on AWS via SSL. Administrator has a client that runs in the cloud that uses SSL and all Sonian components are in the cloud allowing Sonian to rely on AWS for security and robustness.
For security they use the data encryption services provided by AWS with .509 certificates. They also only use their own AMI images and do not use or advocate using the public ones due to the potential of trojans or leaks. One thing they do in addition is they have their AMI’s reviewed using Ouncelabs or Vericode to make sure their code is “certified” as secure.
Greg did a great job presenting the companies service offer and it was useful to see the value in shifting from a traditional “product” acquisition to a cloud SaaS model for enterprise email archiving.
One other note is that from the four cloud meetings we’ve had so far – we’ve had two startup companies speak so far – both of which (Sonian and Pixily) have built services that “sell” to their customers (one enterprise and one consumer/SMB) storage/archiving in the cloud. Security was a common theme during the Q&A’s. It will be interesting to see if the trend of startups, SaaS, Archive/Storage, and security continue to be the early issues and services chosen by entrepreneurs.
Here is the sonian Podcast (MP3) and here is the sonian_cloud_archiving presntation (PDF).
-wayne
