Email records hold volumes of sensitive and valuable data that must be made available quickly in the event of an audit, investigation, or legal request. As the leading provider of cloud-based email archiving, email compliance, email discovery, and email continuity solutions, LiveOffice manages massive amounts of highly sensitive data for more than 18,000 clients.
RAPID GROWTH BRINGS CHALLENGES
Maintaining outstanding service became more challenging as data volumes increased, the customer base grew, and technology complexity intensified. Traditionally, providers like LiveOffice built their own infrastructures and colocated them. However, as LiveOffice looked forward, this traditional approach was not going to allow the company to keep pace with customers’ needs in a flexible and cost-effective way.
For example, bringing up a new datacenter could take up to six months of infrastructure analysis and planning, financing negotiation, procurement and installation, provisioning, and testing. Alternatively, LiveOffice could overprovision its network in advance and be assured of having capacity but have no guarantee of generating revenue in a predictable timeframe. Thus, capital would be wasted on idle resources.
Additionally, LiveOffice wanted to build a newer, larger disaster recovery site so that it could replicate production data easily to assure business continuity. However, duplicating datacenters simply duplicated the amount of time, number of resources, and high costs that the company already faced.
SIMPLIFYING IN THE CLOUD
As the LiveOffice team began investigating how to solve for this, it first went to its colocation provider to evaluate a cloud-based offering. However, this provider’s offering required that LiveOffice move both its computing and storage infrastructures to the cloud. LiveOffice outsourced its data storage to a different provider, which specialized in storing high volumes of data and with whom the company had a good relationship. Moving storage was not an appealing option, and so LiveOffice had almost given up on finding a solution that would allow it to leverage the cloud and its existing storage infrastructure.
“I honestly did not think it was going to be possible to meet our customers’ needs in any way other than through costly and labor-intensive colocation,” said Nick Mehta, chief executive officer of LiveOffice. “Fortunately, my team kept looking and found Terremark.”
The LiveOffice team approached Terremark at a trade show for information on basic colocation services. Once the Terremark team members understood what LiveOffice needed, they demonstrated Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud and swept the LiveOffice team off its feet.
Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud combines the power and flexibility of infrastructure-as-a-service with the expertise, security, and availability that large organizations require for their mission-critical computing. An easy-to-use management interface provides command and control over a cloud-based pool of compute, storage, and network resources. Because it is based on dynamic resources instead of server units, Enterprise Cloud enables organizations to precisely manage and allocate computing resources when and where they are needed.
Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud is built on a fully clustered enterprise-class computing architecture, featuring virtualization technology from VMware, and housed in Terremark’s massively connected, top-tier datacenters. And, because it’s based on Terremark’s proven Infinistructure utility computing platform and leverages leading-edge information security services, Enterprise Cloud provides the scale, performance, and security required for enterprise-wide applications.
THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS
LiveOffice chose Terremark to provide a hybrid cloud solution that seamlessly integrates its dedicated storage devices into an Enterprise Cloud environment – allowing LiveOffice to leverage its existing storage provider. Today, LiveOffice runs its production environments on cloud infrastructure hosted at one of Terremark’s physically robust datacenters in the U.S. and in a second datacenter in Europe.
“Having a hybrid infrastructure is huge for us,” said Joshua Stageberg, senior director of technology. “Our infrastructure depends on large amounts of storage in order to optimize the client experience. Everything must be able to run through the cloud with superior performance, and it does.”
The hybrid cloud environment also provides LiveOffice with greater management flexibility. With the storage network and colocated physical devices integrated into Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud, the IT team sees everything as a single environment and can turn devices up and down as needed.
THE FAST TRACK TO HIGH CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
LiveOffice dramatically accelerated the deployment time for its environment by utilizing Enterprise Cloud, reducing it to just two months. In turn, it is able to reduce implementation time for new customers to just days. Fast time to deployment contributes to high customer satisfaction and speeds revenue generation for LiveOffice.
When the YMCA of the USA was replacing its premises-based email archiving and email discovery solution, having a cloud-based solution was a requirement. In addition to providing the archiving and discovery capabilities the YMCA needed, LiveOffice’s cloud-based solution also provides the YMCA with business continuity benefits that it had previously lacked.
“I’ve always liked LiveOffice because they are so responsive to our needs,” said Paul Haisman, senior director of IT for the YMCA of the USA. “Its cloud-based solution is fast, we gained significantly more functionality, and it allows us to focus on our mission, which is not standing up server infrastructure.”
THE SHORTEST PATH TO SAVINGS
In cloud environments, the large number of specialized technologies and functionalities involved require specialized expertise to deploy, manage, and scale. With the rapid growth that LiveOffice experiences, it cannot afford to double its IT staff to support the growth. Instead, the company can take advantage of Terremark’s technology expertise, enabling its internal IT team to focus on optimizing critical applications and delivering on Service Level Agreements
(SLAs) instead of supporting physical infrastructure. LiveOffice gained high availability, performance, and scalability with the same number of internal resources.
“We are also able to avoid or significantly reduce capital expenditures, because we do not have to deploy new servers and compute infrastructure as we grow,” said Mehta. “We can scale as needed, when needed. This capability enabled us to win new business without having to invest in large infrastructure additions up front.”
High availability and high performance provide assurances that compute resources are available the moment that they are needed, without a 30-plus day deployment period for new infrastructure. LiveOffice is also able to replicate data to its disaster recovery site much faster than was possible over the Internet. LiveOffice pays only for the cloud infrastructure that it normally needs, and leverages Enterprise Cloud’s Burst Mode to access a pool of additional resources when needed. If a disaster occurs and usage peaks on the disaster recovery infrastructure, Enterprise Cloud’s Burst Mode instantly allocates the necessary cloud resources without LiveOffice having to set up additional servers. This delivers a highly cost-effective solution for the company’s infrastructure needs.
The LiveOffice team also likes the self-service features of the Enterprise Cloud Web interface. The IT team can easily set up their own load balancing, firewalls, and other network elements and build servers to meet the requirements of their missioncritical applications.
NEXT STEPS
With Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud service, LiveOffice successfully pursued and won two large opportunities with householdname customers, one of which needed simultaneous presence in the U.S. and Europe. “Members of the Terremark team helped us roll out service to the new, global customer,” said Mehta. “They enabled us to deliver flawless execution and we look forward to even more successful deployments.”