Astaro Finally Unleashes Mail Archiving

Astaro has launched their first hosted service, which happens to be cloud e-mail archiving. It works with Microsoft Exchange and is touted as having unlimited storage while making it easier to administer. Here are some quick details.

First, something worth noting: In January 2010 Astaro highlighted their technology track for 2010, with Astaro RED slated to be making a debut in April (but ended up late May). Now, their e-mail archiving solution (with a May release date), has actually come to fruition in June.

Astaro’s own words on this unlimited hosted e-mail archiving solution is that for only “a small fee per month and user, without any additional costs” you can actually have an “indefinite” amount of time and storage. The idea is to appeal to over-worked network admins and companies who have backup fatigue and storage issues. The software is designed to work easily and specifically with Microsoft Outlook.

Astaro is positioning use of their service as a no-brainer, citing compliance laws with backing up sensitive business information, along with audit logging capabilities. Astaro also says that as employees get used to deleting email with more frequency thanks to the cloud safety-net, the overall load required to backup will decrease, apparently making backups ever-increasingly shorter.

There’s also no true software maintenance or administration required on the part of the user or IT staff. Astaro says “we do it for them” and the only thing required to retrieve e-mail is a quick “Google-like” search inside a browser or from within the Outlook plug-in.

Of course, Astaro focuses on an intensely competitive market, where many storage software providers are now introducing online backup services and/or managed services pricing. Recent moves in that direction include CA Technologies launch of MSP pricing for ARCserve. And we expect at least one other major storage giant to introduce MSP pricing within days. Meanwhile, pure online backup providers like Intronis say many of their MSP partners already offer online backup to Exchange Server and Microsoft Small Business Server.

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