Posted on 3 June 2008 by James Blake

I read with interest Alan Pelz-Sharpe's recent post on Cloud Computing and Content Management on the CMS Trendwatch blog.

In his article, Pelz-Sharpe criticises Software-as-a-Service due to the carbon footprint of large datacentres typically used by Software-as-a-Service companies.  He specifically singles out archiving and content management for analysis.  The ultimate argument is that effective email and archive management can reduce volume of retained email down to a 10% of its original volume and as a result the footprint for archiving can be reduced to a single server.

Unfortunately what Pelz-Sharpe refers to as the ‘efficient management of content’ results in potentially future evidence as a part of a civil or criminal prosecution being lost forever.  Especially with civil prosecutions, even the most innocuous email today may become evidence tomorrow.  Can any organisation predict how all of the parties they interact with on a daily basis are going to act in our increasingly litigious society for the next decade?

The economies of scale of well-designed multi-tenanted environments mean that when you break a storage and processing grid down, it can equate to less than one commodity server per customer - yet still provides infinite scalability and sub-second discovery of decade's worth of email.

With a service that covers end-to-end email management such as Mimecast's, in fact we are normally displacing several other server platforms and associated hardware.  For instance the need for clustering high availability mail servers and associated redundant interconnections; disclaimer management appliances; anti-spam appliances; anti-virus appliances; attachment management appliances; archiving software servers; database servers for the archive; storage arrays and associated switching fabric; email marketing appliances - the list goes on and on.

There are a lot of half-empty data centres built during the dot com boom, these are the real culprits.  A full data centre running well thought out applications that achieve true SaaS economies-of-scale only help green computing without compromising potential future litigation.  As organisations can downscale their own internal IT infrastructure, corporate-owned data centres will reduce in size and, therefore, carbon footprint. 

I am not one of these SaaS purists that believes that corporate data centres can shut up shop overnight and move to cloud, but I believe SaaS will gradually result in organisations saving enough money to ensure they can invest in greener solutions for their own reduced server footprint.

Category: Chains-of-Custody, Discovery, Green Computing

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