Ferris Analyzer Information Service. Report #798. October 2008. 

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Control

With an on-premise solution, the IT staff is in control. There are two

key considerations:

First, you can set priorities. For example:

" If a big lawsuit arrives, you can apply the appropriate resources to

respond to discovery requests in a timely way. Some SaaS

offerings can require interaction with SaaS staff to expedite the

request. If the SaaS employees are busy with another, bigger

customer s emergency, then yours might get deferred. (Note that

many SaaS solutions give full control to the business and allow it

to run its own e-discovery requests, which gives IT the same level

of data control as an on-premise solution.)

" If you need to migrate to another solution, the SaaS vendor may

not respond as quickly as you d like.

Second, you can organize processes and procedures the way you want

them to be organized. For example, you can define and implement

specific deletion policies. You can ensure that old tapes are destroyed,

deep erasures are performed on disk, and so on. With SaaS, deleted

data may no longer be visible to you, but it may still exist on the

service provider s system.

Performance

WAN Considerations

Companies archive large amounts of information. In some cases, they

must archive a large volume of data at one time, such as during initial

system startup or during periodic maintenance, where the entire

message store must be backed up. In that case, 1.5GB of email per

user must commonly be transferred to the store. This is not a problem

over LAN speeds, but it will normally take many days over most

organizations WANs. In such cases, data transfer may have to take

place via USB hard disks or DLT tape sent by trusted couriers.

The volume of data transferred on a daily basis should also be

considered 50MB per user per day is not unusual. For 100 users,

that is 5GB of data daily. A 1.5Mbit/sec WAN link with no other

traffic can transfer about 500MB per hour. So 5GB takes about 10

hours of a dedicated 1.5Mbit/sec link, each day, to transfer. These are

rough estimates, but they illustrate the issue.

Even with large volumes, WAN links are inexpensive, so providing

the necessary bandwidth may not be a problem. Nevertheless,

bandwidth should certainly be considered during planning; at the very

least, transfer times should be thought through.