Moved into the Clouds

I had started this blog initially as a way to discuss storage and virtualization solutions while working as a technology consultant.  But recently a new opportunity presented itself, and I’ve now made the transition out of consulting, and back to the start-up world.   This most recent adventure is with a company called Sonian which provides a cloud based data archiving and eDiscovery solution.  What is so wonderful about this new venture is we leverage the Amazon Web Services cloud providing us the ability to consume storage and computing by the granule.  We don’t need to make huge capital outlays in data centers, storage, servers, etc…  And since we don’t need to buy and maintain all this hardware (which will eventually be refreshed in 3-5 years), we can keep the costs low and pass on those savings to our customers.

Email is a management nightmare for companies.  People want to keep their emails forever, they don’t want mailbox quotas, and they have decided that email is the best place to store all their documents.   While working as a technology consultant, many people I spoke with wanted to outsource their email problem, and you see this as large organizations such as the City of LA move to Google Apps. Now, most companies are not there yet when it comes to outsourcing all their email, but outsourcing archiving is something that many companies are steadily moving towards.  They don’t want to spend thousands on storage and servers for an archiving solution that is only used from time to time.  This is where Sonian comes in.  We can take your emails that you’ve been saving for 5 or 10 years, bring them in to our cloud based service and keep them securely, forever.  And no, we won’t charge you huge amounts to do this, just a simple flat monthly fee per user, per month.  We’ll also provide you a  web based interface to search and categorize your emails for compliance or investigatory reasons, and well as end user acesss.

So, it is a pretty exciting time here at Sonian, with almost 1900 customers in the past couple years we must on to something. And our explosive growth here only confirms that “The Cloud” is here, and people are ready to push their data up to it.