LiveArchive is Dead, Long Live LiveArchive
ExchangeDefender recently announced changes to our LiveArchive service and its future as an email backup and archiving service that gives you control and ownership over your email. As you may know, no popular email solutions like Office365 and Gmail include a backup. If your account is accidentally deleted, hacked, or encrypted your data is lost – permanently.
Until now ExchangeDefender LiveArchive has served as a business continuity solution, enabling clients to send and receive email when their mail server or email cloud service experiences an outage or maintenance window.
When we first built LiveArchive in early 00’s the business Internet world was different. Clients overwhelmingly owned and managed their own email servers that ran on Internet connections and experienced frequent outages.
Our clients needed to send and receive email during these outages reliably but this was way before the era of smartphones, hotspots, reliable Wi-Fi, and secure Wi-Fi availability virtually everywhere. Naturally, clients needed a sophisticated web interface (first LiveArchive ran on an Exchange Server 2003 backend) and were usually working from LiveArchive for hours or days depending on the severity of the outage.
As many organizations moved their email hosting to the cloud the need changed from long-term powerful archiving to fast, secure, and mobile-friendly access to the latest messages and the ability to send and receive email during outages.
-Vlad Mazek, CEO ExchangeDefender
Last year we introduced you to ExchangeDefender Inbox, our next-generation live mailbox explicitly designed for reliable email access during outages. ExchangeDefender Inbox features a minimalist user interface that is fast, reliable, and intuitive – making it easy to work with from anywhere and on any device without having to set up or maintain anything – It’s just your Inbox live on ExchangeDefender.
If you can’t reach your email, Go to Inbox.
Need long-term backups and archiving? That’s LiveArchive’s new trick.
So what is LiveArchive up to?
Over the past few years of crypto locker and frequent Microsoft security exploits, many of our clients faced ransomware and lost email after getting hacked. Many found out the hard way that Microsoft and Google only offer the service but do not provide backup or mail snapshots – that’s your responsibility.
Enter new LiveArchive.
As many of our clients moved to the cloud we’ve become instrumental in providing them with a reliable backup solution for their Office365/M365 tenants as well as a wide variety of email servers and services.
For too many organizations LiveArchive became the last source of email data and the only emails they could recover after a security compromise that left their data cryptolocked and held for ransom. In working with them we were often asked to provide a more thorough email backup replication that could help organizations meet their new security objectives. At the same time, regulatory requirements and cyber-insurance got more demanding about keeping an offsite copy of all relevant company information.
We’ve built them all into the new LiveArchive.
Here are the main benefits:
- Live backup of all mail flowing through your organization (inbound and outbound messages are transparently archived through SMTP connectors)
- Email backups are stored on industry standard S3 data object storage service available in the cloud from Amazon AWS as well as free open source solutions, enabling you to store backups anywhere you want.
- The client owns all the email backups and storage accounts and can set data retention as they want. Because they are on a client-managed storage system messages can be connected to services for eDiscover, analytics, disaster recovery, record sharing, and more.
The key benefit is that you’re getting a free service that can archive your messages in real time to a data object storage service you own or control. Similar solutions cost between $30-50/year for each user/mailbox, enabling you to save on your backups while improving recovery.
TL;DR;
ExchangeDefender Inbox is your new always-available, always-realtime email business continuity solution, enabling your users to continue sending and receiving emails during an outage. Just go to https://admin.exchangedefender.com and click on Inbox.
Next steps:
Next month (early November) we will be making the new LiveArchive available enabling you to make live and continuous backups of your Microsoft M365, Office 365, Google Gmail, and other business email.
ExchangeDefender Domain Default Security Policy
Has it been a while since you last reviewed your email policies? Do you need to make sure that every user in your organization gets the same protection and the same service behavior and reporting?
We’ve taken some of our most popular features and wrapped them in a user-friendly wizard that will allow you to quickly configure ExchangeDefender. These settings establish the bare minimum configuration you need to reliably send and receive email on the Internet and instruct ExchageDefender how to sort your email.
Security Policy Overview
Our goal with the Security Policy wizard is to save time while configuring the major aspects of ExchangeDefender. While you still have access to hundreds of policies and can always configure new custom ones (as business requirements demand) it’s nice to know you can quickly adjust the features and make sure they apply to everyone in the organization.
You’ll be able to teach ExchangeDefender how to categorize mail, how long to keep it, and how to report it. Basic SPAM, malware, phishing, and address enforcement policies can be configured in seconds.
We’ve also added some of the settings that are exclusive to ExchangeDefender (From: policy enforcement) and some that always give IT teams trouble (DNS, DKIM + SPF records). The goal was to present all the required and support-intensive features in a friendly way so you can protect your network without knowing the details of the latest standards and security best practices.
Default Security Policy will automatically display the first time you log in as a Domain Administrator. It will load your current settings into the policy and allow you to review it or apply it to all the users in the domain. All the settings are still in their normal places so you can fine-tune your protection and features (https://www.exchangedefender.com/docs >remember the docs).
We hope this new wizard saves you time and gives you peace of mind that your protection is configured correctly.